





SHELDON 


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THE STORY 


OF 

THE BIBLE 

FROM THE STANDPOINT 

OF 

MODERN SCHOLARSHIP 

BY 

WALTER L. SHELDON 

* 

Founder and for Twenty-one Years Lecturer of 
The Ethical Society of St. Louis 


Second Edition 




S. BURNS WESTON, Publisher 
1415 Locust Street 
Philadelphia, Pa. 

1909 


*BS 4-4S- 

.S 4S 

140 ^ 


Copyright 

by 

MRS. W. L. SHELDON 


PREFATORY NOTE. 


The author trusts it will be clearly understood that 
these lectures are intended rather for those who do not 
know very much about the Bible but would like to 
know more. For this reason the pages have not been 
encumbered with references to authorities or with lists 
of books which would only tire the reader. It is not as 
if the writer were contending for some peculiar theory 
of his own. Those who wish to make further study of 
the subject can get such lists from the same sources as 
those which have been open to the author. The ma- 
terial presented here is meant only as an introduction 
to what has been an unexplored field for many other- 
wise well educated people. The lectures were first 
given under the auspices of the Ethical Society in St. 
Louis and were inaugurated with fear and trepidation 
lest they should prove of little interest. To the lec- 
turer’s surprise, the attendance was unusually large. 
Men from commercial and professional life came in 
numbers, with a singular curiosity to find what the 
Bible was about or what had been discovered with re- 
gard to it by modern scholarship. Under these cir- 
cumstances it seemed fitting to let the lectures go forth 
in volume-form, appearing just as they were given, as 
lectures — addressed to those who wish to learn some- 
thing more about the Bible. 

W. L. Sheldon. 


St. Louis, Mo., 1899. 


INTRODUCTION 


It was with great pleasure that I consented to ex- 
amine the late Mr. Sheldon’s little book with a view of 
suggesting such changes as may have been called for 
by the progress in Biblical scholarship since its appear- 
ance about ten years ago. 

I found that only a few changes were necessary. 
Mr. Sheldon was an unusually careful student, and 
thanks to the discriminating judgment embodied in 
his presentation of the subject, only such results as at 
the time he wrote could fairly be regarded as definite 
were set forth. The work may, therefore, still be re- 
commended as a safe guide to those who wish to ob- 
tain a general idea of the attitude taken by modern 
scholarship towards the books of the Bible. 

This remark applies not only to the books of the Old 
Testament, the study of which falls within my field, 
but to the chapters on the New Testament as well ; and 
in order to be sure of my ground in regard to the lat- 
ter, I have asked my friend and colleague, Professor J. 
A. Montgomery, to examine these chapters, and sug- 
gest whatever changes seemed to him to be called for. 
In order that Mr. Sheldon’s exposition of the subject 
should stand as a memorial to him, the lamented 
scholar and teacher whose early demise is so seriously 
felt, the changes have been embodied in a series of 
foot-notes in all but such comparatively minor mat- 
ters, as dates and names, in which the needed altera- 
tions have been embodied in the text itself. 

The book is eminently deserving of a second edition 
and is especially to be commended for the sympathetic 
treatment of the subject and for the fine ethical spirit 
which breathes through its pages. Mr. Sheldon’s work 
shows that the Bible loses none of its power, beauty or 
impressiveness and therefore none of its real value be- 
cause of the new point of view from which it is now re- 


garded and that it gains in clearness by the discarding 
of traditional and conventional views which cannot 
stand the test of criticism. 

The real Bible has nothing to fear but everything to 
gain from a critical study in the full light of 
historical, archaeological and philological investi- 
gation. The stories in Genesis retain their ethi- 
cal and religious value when viewed as rem- 
nants of myths and folk-lore, because it is the pecu- 
liar spirit — the spirit of ethical idealism — put into these 
tales under the influence of the prophets’ view of life 
and of the universe that has given to Genesis its dis- 
tinctive place. The view that the entire uni- 
verse is the emanation of a single power transcending 
the grasp of human intellect is not affected by the re- 
flection that the order of creation and many of the de- 
tails in the narrative reflect primitive fancies and crude 
speculations based largely on popular myths. The 
story of the Flood viewed as an elaboration of 
an ancient nature myth has no ethical or religious 
value, but the conception of the catastrophe, not as a 
caprice of the gods, but as a punishment for corrup- 
tion and wrong-doing, embodies a point of view that 
is as important for our days as for any other period 
in the world’s history. Noah pictured as a righteous 
man and therefore singled out for divine grace 
is an impressive figure even though presented to us 
in a framework of myth and folk-lore. The patriarchs 
with the curious mixture in the tales concerning them 
of national traditions, tribal legends, petty political 
rivalries and even tribal scandals, yet stand out as 
types that can be used under certain limitations for il- 
lustrations of the play of ethics in human conduct, 
while Moses — the most commanding figure in the Old 
Testament — is a veritable source of ethical and relig* 
ious inspiration because of the light in which his life is 
viewed. 

There are to be sure other sides to the Bible besides 
the ethical and religious phases and these too are skill- 
fully touched upon by Mr. Sheldon. The study of the 
Pentateuchal Codes is of the utmost interest to the stu- 
dent of customs and rites ; and this study has been 


made possible through the recognition of the various 
strata to be found in the groups of laws. Similarly, the 
historical narratives can only be properly understood if 
we separate them, as modern scholarship has done, into 
their various sources and within these sources distin- 
guish between facts and legendary — and in part myth- 
ical — accretions on the one side, and between the narra- 
tive itself and the interpretation put upon events by the 
later compilers in the endeavor to make the narrative 
illustrative of certain conceptions of the past, or of re- 
ligious theories that had in part at best already be- 
come traditional when the final shape was given to the 
historical books of the Old Testament. 

The flower of the ethical and religious thought ap- 
pears in the Prophets, and Mr. Sheldon has set forth 
this phase of the subject is so succinct and impressive 
a manner that no words need be wasted here to em- 
phasize the commanding position assigned in the do- 
main of religious history to the great teachers of 
Israel. 

Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs 
and Ruth, covering a wide range of literary activity 
require perhaps even more than the other books of the 
Bible an acquaintance with the modern critical point 
of view in order to become intelligible to the lay pub- 
lic. Unless viewed in relationship to the times when 
they were produced and interpreted with an endeavor 
to understand what is in them, instead of reading cer- 
tain doctrines and views into them, they lose their dis- 
tinctive plan. It is through these more distinctive liter- 
ary productions that we can penetrate into the real 
meaning of Hebrew history and of the religion and re- 
ligious philosophy as developed in the course of cen- 
turies in Palestine. The broad and sympathetic spirit 
of the author manifests itself also in his treatment of 
the transition period which led to the birth of Chris- 
tianity. In accordance with the trend of modern criti- 
cism he traces the origin of the movement to the Pro- 
phets of the eighth and seventh centuries whose 
efforts were destined to lead to an increasing empha- 
sis on the universalistic elements inherent in a faith 
resting on a monotheistic conception of the universe. 


Certain changes were required in the chapter on “The 
New Testament” in order to adapt it to the present 
stage of new testament studies, but they do not affect 
the essential features in Mr. Sheldon’s clear succinct 
presentation of the growth of the New Testament lit- 
erature. The closing chapter on “The Bible as Poetry 
and Literature” has a special interest as an illustra- 
tion of the rare gifts of the late author himself which 
enabled him to penetrate beneath the surface to the 
very core of those perpetual truths of human conduct 
and of faith in unseen purposes that find their illustra- 
tion in the Bible as in no other production of ancient 
or modern times. 

Morris Jastrow, Jr. 

Philadelphia, Pa. 


I wish to acknowledge my great indebtedness to 
Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr., of the University of 
Pennsylvania, not only for his kind introduction to 
this second edition of my husband’s “Story of the 
Bible,” but also for revising the Old Testament part, 
and to Professor James A. Montgomery, of the Epis- 
copal Divinity School of Philadelphia, for kindly re- 
vising the New Testament portion. 

Anna H. Sheldon. 


St. Louis, Mo. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


Approximate Dates 9 

I. The English Bible u 

II. The Original Bible and How it Was Put Together . . 31 

III. The Bible and History 50 

IV. The Bible and Prophecy 70 

V. The Belief in God as it Appears in the Biblei .... 88 

VI. The Messianic Expectation in the Bible no 

VII. Jesus and the Background of the New Testament . .132 

VIII. The New Testament; Its Growth and Completion . . 150 

IX. The Bible as Literature 170 


APPROXIMATE DATES IN CONNECTION WITH THE 
HISTORY OF THE BIBLE, GIYEN IN ROUND 
NUMBERS, ACCORDING TO THE MORE 
RECENT OPINIONS OF BIBLE SCHOLARS 


1300 B. C. — Moses and the Flight of the Israelites 
from Egypt. 

1000 B. C. — Time of David and the Foundation of the 
Kingdom at Jerusalem. 

750 B. C. — Rise of Prophecy, with Amos and Hosea 
in the North, and the Revolution in the Re- 
ligious Spirit of Older Judaism. 

722 B. C. — Fall of the Northern Kingdom by the 
Attack of the Assyrians, and the Time of the 
“First” Isaiah at Jerusalem. 

621 B. C. — Publication of the First Elements of a 
Bible — The Book of Deuteronomy. 

586 B. C. — Destruction of Jerusalem by the Baby- 
lonians, in the Time of the Prophet “Jeremiah,” 
followed by the Period of the “Exile,” as the 
Time of the Compilation of the “Pentateuch” 
out of Older Documents, and the Probable 
Date of the Writing of the Books of the 
“Kings” ; also, the Period of the Prophet 
Ezekiel, and a Little Later the “Second” Isaiah. 

444 B. C. — First Regular Establishment of a Jewish 
Church and the Adoption of a First Canon 
of Sacred Scripture, under Ezra and Nehemiah 
— following the Restoration of Jerusalem. The 
First Canon of Scripture adopted, including 
probably only the “Pentateuch.” 

160 B. C. — The Struggle with “Hellenism” and the 
Greek Empire. The Time of the “Maccabees.” 
The Date of the Closing of the Old Testament 
with the Writing of the Book of “Daniel.” Be- 
tween This and the Preceding Date, 444 B. C., 
probably to be ascribed the “Chronicles,” 
“Job,” “Proverbs” and most of the Psalms.” 

4 B. C. — Birth of Jesus and the Dawn of Chris- 
tianity. 


50-60 A. D. — First Portions of the New Testament to 
be written. Some of the “Epistles” of St. Paul. 
69 A. D. — Final Destruction of Jerusalem by the Ro- 
mans under Hadrian. 

70-100 A. D. — Probable Period of the Writing of the 
Four “Gospels.” Also More of the “Epistles” 
and the Book of “Revelations.” 

120 A. D. — The Four “Gospels” Coming to be Rec- 
ognized as the Starting Point of a New Sacred 
Scripture, which, however, did not as yet in- 
clude the “Epistles” or the Book of “Revela- 
tions.” 

200 A. D. — The Whole of the New Testament about 
as we now have it, coming to be accepted as an 
Additional Canon of Scripture for Christianity. 

The date of the “Apocrypha” is not Given Above. But 
as the Connecting Link between the Old and 
New Testaments it is most important. In 
round numbers, the “Apocrypha,” including 
the Significant Apocalypse of the Book of 
“Enoch,” belongs to the Transitional Epoch 
from the Maccabees to the Birth of Jesus. 

IMPORTANT TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE 

I. — The “Septuagint,” a Translation of the Old Testa- 

ment into Greek made for the most part in the 
Two Centuries Preceding the Christian Era. 

II. — The “Peshito,” a Translation of the Bible into 

Syriac made in the Early Centuries of the Chris- 
tian Era. 

III. — The Gothic Bible. A Translation into Gothic 

Language made by Wulfilas in the Fourth 
Century. 

IV. — The “Vulgate,” a Translation of the Whole Bible 

into Latin and attributed to St. Jerome about 
400 A. D. . 

V. — Martin Luther’s Translation of the Bible into 

German — 1522-34 A. D. 

VI. — The English Bible — called the “Ring James’ 

Version,” published in 1611 A. D. 

VII. — The polychrome or “Scholars’ ” Bible, being 

issued at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. 


The Story of the Bible 


THE ENGLISH BIBLE 


You step into a book store in one of our large cities 
and ask for a copy of the Bible. It may be that the 
clerk who waits on you will be unusually intelligent, 
or more than usually careful, and will ask you 
whether you wish for the “revised version.” In all 
probability, however, he will not put that question, 
but will take you to a case where you will see copies 
of the Bible in many bindings and at many prices. 
You choose one easy to handle, with a flexible bind- 
ing, in the style in which the better copies are made 
up nowadays, pay your money for it and depart. 

Some evening when you have leisure, and do 
not know what to do with yourself, you get out your 
purchase and decide to open it and see what it looks 
like. You turn to the first page and observe how the 
book begins. And you read: 

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 
And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was 
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved 
upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be 
light;’ and there was light.” 

You are not quite sure whether it is going to be 
very interesting, this new book which looks so at- 
tractive and opens so easily in your hands. But — 
forgetting, perhaps, that it is not a novel — you look 
to the last page in order to see how it ends, and you 
read : 

“I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the 
prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto them, God 
shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; 

11 


12 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of 
this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life 
and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written 
in this book. He which testifieth these things saith : ‘Surely I 
come quickly. Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus.’ The grace 
of the Lord Jesus be with you all. Amen.” 

You turn over the leaves and find that it is a pretty 
long book, with something like a thousand pages. 
And on examining it a little more carefully you dis- 
cover that it is divided into two portions; one, the 
much shorter portion, covering about three hundred 
pages, and called the “New Testament”; and the 
other part much longer, making up three-quarters of 
the volume, and entitled the “Old Testament.” 

After this cursory glance over your purchase you 
say to yourself : “This, then, is what has been known 
since the earliest times as the Bible.” At this point, 
however, I must warn you. Take care ! Do not go 
any farther than your knowledge will warrant. Your 
assumption is a mistake. This volume has not been 
known from the earliest times as the “Bible.” 

In the early days it was called “Ta Biblia,” “the 
books” — not “the book.” It is we of the later age 
who have given it the title “The Bible.” To the peo- 
ple of the early time it was “the books,” “the bibles” 
— that is to say, “the sacred literature.” 

In a word, what you have in your hands was in 
those ages not a book, but a literature. Many an igno- 
rant person has assumed that the last words at the 
end of this volume applied to the whole book ; whereas 
everyone who is acquainted with it knows that those 
words apply to one part of it only, “The Book of 
Revelations.” 

In fact, not until almost 200 years after the birth of 
Jesus was there a distinctly recognized set of books as 
the accepted “Sacred Literature.” About that time in 
the Christian Church they began to speak of what they 
called “The Canon,” or “The Canon of Sacred Scrip- 
ture” — the word “Canon” coming from a Greek term 
meaning “rule” or “standard,” as some translate it, 
or as others translate it, “list.” At last they were com- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


13 


in g to have a “list” of sacred books. But, bear in 
mind, it was still “Ta Biblia,” the books, not the 
“Bible.” 

It is of “Ta Biblia,” as it was called, the sacred 
books or the sacred literature, of which I am going to 
talk in these lectures. You may be rather perplexed 
or surprised over the attitude I shall take. My pur- 
pose is not to dissect these books or tear them to 
pieces for you, as you may fancy, with the idea of 
pointing out the errors there, because I pass for a 
radical or a rationalist, as I am. On the contrary, my 
aim is to tell this story and go over this literature 
with the other plan in view; of doing what I can to 
arouse a deeper, stronger interest in this literature. 
I want, if I can, to make you see what it stands for. 

For a person of the present day, with education and 
culture, not to know about the Bible is rank stupidity. 
It is pathetic to have to admit that nowadays many 
persons know more about Shakespeare than they do 
about the Bible. Sometime ago a person who, I as- 
sumed, had had a good high school education, came to 
me in distress, asking me where in the Bible to look 
for one of the Epistles of St. Paul. On taking the book 
into my hands and seeing it where it was opened, I ob- 
served that my inquirer had been searching for the 
Epistle back in the Pentateuch. It would not be sur- 
prising to have the same experience with a university 
graduate as well. Yet, as concerns actual in- 
fluence on the world, influence on other literatures of 
the world, influence on the way you think nowadays, 
your views of life, your more serious attitude toward 
the world, even on the kind of language you use when 
you talk with one another, this book counts for vastly 
more than your Shakespeare, your Goethe, your Dante 
or your Plato. 

No other set of books of any literature or any race 
or any people has ever begun to have the influence 
which has been exerted on the civilized world by the 
Bible. And this is as true, or more so, of the world 
to-day than of the world a thousand years ago. We 
are less aware of this now, because we read other 


14 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


literatures so much more, without stopping to appre- 
ciate the fact that these other literatures have caught 
much of their finest spirit from the afflatus of the 
Bible. 

All the while, however, I am speaking as a radical 
or a rationalist, judging this book from the human 
side, as I would judge the literature of the Buddhists, 
the teachings of the Stoics, or the philosophy of 
Greece. 

It is my purpose to inspire you, if I can, with the 
resolve to go back once more and study this boook 
called the “Bible,” if you have ceased doing this ; or to 
lead you determinedly to read it carefully if you 
have never done so before. It rests for me as a teacher 
in ethics to assert, with the utmost candor, that more 
ethical influence has come from this book or set of 
books than from any other literature in the world. 
I have read it and re-read it ; and the more I turn to it 
the more it stirs and moves me, the more I realize 
what it has meant to Christendom, and what it implies 
for us to be the heirs of such an influence in this age 
of the “enlightened” nineteenth century. 

It is high time for us, as radicals and rationalists, 
to abandon the foolish prejudice that inasmuch as a 
vast number of persons have managed to find all sorts 
of crude and grotesque theories in the Bible, and have 
become expounders of the strangest superstitions 
on this account; that because many men have forced 
their own philosophy into the Bible, or twisted its 
language out of all meaning in order to suit their own 
“pet views,” or because certain minds have thrown 
the whole emphasis of their interests in the Bible on 
its minor aspects or least important features — that, 
therefore, this so-called Sacred Literature has been 
the mother of superstition. Like many another 
book, it might be the mother of superstition in a 
superstitious age, just as it may be the mother of 
enlightenment in an enlightened age. Through all 
history it has been pretty much the same. The con- 
ditions of the age will determine the interpretation of 
any book or literature. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


15 


It behooves us now, as I say, to abandon that old 
prejudice and to go back and make a study of this 
wonderful literature which has meant so much to the 
human race. I shall treat it as I would treat the writ- 
ings of the Buddhists or of Plato, aiming to sift it 
down and make you see what portions are of the most 
value, and what may be of less consequence or have 
had the least influence. 

It is the new scholarship, to my mind, which has 
given back to us the Bible, and which is going to 
make it of more interest to the world, more popular to 
the average reader and more influential in certain 
ways than it ever has been before. The new scholar- 
ship can do this, because it can present this book as 
an historic fact — by this means giving us an interpre- 
' tation of it such as never could have been had before. 
We do not mean by this that the new scholarship 
has shown us how this book teaches facts of history, 
but rather how the book itself has been a fact of his- 
tory. 

We will turn once more to the copy of the book 
which you call the “Bible,” and which you may have 
recently purchased from your book store, and I ask 
you to examine it carefully and make sure at the out- 
set to what extent the volume in your hands is the 
original Bible. We may as well tell you at the start 
that if you go on the supposition that what you have 
before you as it stands there is the original sacred 
literature, you are mistaken. What you hold before 
you is distinctively “The English Bible.” 

Look now and see. You open somewhere in the 
middle of the volume, and you find at the top of the 
page the heading, “Isaiah.” You glance down and 
find headlines in the middle of the column, such as 
“Chapter 50” or “Chapter 51,” and you observe that 
all the way through, the separate books are divided up 
into small chapters about a page or less in length. 
But this division into short chapters of this nature 
was not in the original Bible. It is, most distinctively, 
your “English Bible.” 

Again, you read a list of topics in fine print at the 


16 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


head of the chapter, as, for instance, “Christ showeth 
that the dereliction of the Jews is not to be imputed 
to him, by his ability to save, by his obedience in that 
work, and by his confidence in that assistance. An 
exhortation to trust in God and not in ourselves.” 
These are rather strange words to be found in a book 
written many centuries before the time of Jesus. But 
they do not belong to the original Bible. This is 
rather a part of your “English Bible.” 

Furthermore, you look at the top of the page and 
you find, as you will in most books published nowa- 
days, the topics which are being mentioned in the 
words below. And you read, for instance, there : 

“The ample restoration of the church. An exhortation to 
trust in Christ. Christ’s free redemption. His suffering fore- 
told. The church comforted. The prophet calleth to faith. 
Happy state of believers.” 

This, too, seems rather extraordinary as a part of 
the ancient Hebrew literature. But it had nothing to 
do with the original Bible. It has been put in there 
by the translators. It is the English Bible. 

Then, again, you examine the text, and notice how 
it is divided into short verses, three or four lines in 
length, all the way through from the beginning of 
Genesis to the end of Revelation. Now, do you sup- 
pose that when the prophets were speaking, pouring 
forth their denunciations or telling of their anticipa- 
tions for the future of Israel, they stopped to make a 
pause between every sentence or half sentence? 

But this division into verses did not belong to the 
original Bible, although it crept in before this litera- 
ture was translated into modern language. Yet we 
can but faintly appreciate what a peculiar influence 
has come from breaking up each one of these long 
chapters into short verses, as if each separate sentence 
had been uttered like a proverb by itself. It has led 
to the crudest errors and caused the most mislead- 
ing interpretations of this literature, by taking sen- 
tences out of their connection and letting them stand 
by themselves, when their whole meaning is only con- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


17 


veyed through what precedes or follows them in the 
text. 

It was one of our modern preachers who said that 
verses of Scripture should bear the same mark as 
coupons on railway tickets, “not good if detached.” 
But remember this is your English Bible, and not the 
original Bible. 

Still more, you turn to the sides of the pages and 
you will probably find narrow columns in fine print, as 
“references” ; so that when you come on one verse in 
a chapter by Isaiah you may be referred to another 
verse in a chapter in Genesis. This looks innocent 
enough. But by this means it is the easiest thing in 
the world to work in certain pet theories a man be- 
lieves is taught by the Scriptures; taking detached 
sentences from different parts of this whole literature 
and making them all bear on one point, when, origi- 
nally, they had no reference to each other at all. 

Again, I remind you, these columns of “references” 
are a part of the English Bible and had nothing to 
do with the original. 

Up at the top of each of those columns you will 
find a date. It may read, for instance, “Before 
Christ, 712.” This runs all the way through the whole 
thousand pages. On the first page you see it reads 
“Before Christ, 4004,” and on the last page it stands 
“Anno Domine, 96.” 

Now, it would have been very convenient for us if 
Providence had supplied dates for all the events told 
in this* literature, and in such a neat and compact way. 
But I suppose that you know that these dates got in 
here only about 250 years ago, counting from the inves- 
tigations of a certain prelate by the name of Usher, 
an archbishop of England, 1 who worked out a series of 
dates this way for the Scriptures. And from about 
that time they crept into this side column and have 
become conventionally a part of the English Bible. 


^orn 1580; died 1656. In 1650-54 he published his two vols, 
Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, in which he sets forth 
his system of Biblical chronology. 


18 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


You see we have shorn away a good deal from 
your copy of the Bible when contrasting it with what 
was originally there. I remind you again, once for 
all, that the book you hold in your hands ought to 
bear the name which we give to it, “The English 
Bible.” It bears on its face peculiarities of its own, 
having characteristics as a translation, which no other 
translation of any other book in the English language 
can be said to possess. The form of speech into which 
the original thought has been cast seems to make 
the book as essentially English as the plays of Shakes- 
speare themselves. Somehow, in reading this English 
Bible you almost feel as if you had in your hands an 
original literature. 

This is partly owing to the fact that the translators 
oftentimes gave us paraphrases instead of a literal 
version. We get the original sentiment rather than 
the original thought there. The music in the speech 
of the English Bible has had a great deal to do with 
the power it has exerted. Instead of making use of 
the Latinized phraseology which had been creeping 
into the English language for a number of centuries, 
the translators of the Bible employed simple, every- 
day language. Where they might have used “detrac- 
tions” they give us the word “backbitings.” What a 
difference it makes, and how the word strikes home to 
us ! Observe how much they introduced monosyl- 
lables or short words of homely speech. As an illus- 
tration, read the following: 

“Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I 
will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, 
for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto 
your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.” 

Now, of the fifty-one words in those lines, forty- 
two of them are words of one syllable, and the other 
nine are short words, none of them more than six let- 
ters in length. It is this which has introduced the 
English Bible language into popular speech. We 
may talk of “making bricks without straw,” many of 
us not knowing, perhaps, that we are quoting from 
the Bible. We speak of “entertaining angels un- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


19 


awares,” and some of us may not be conscious that 
this is English Bible language. Or one may refer to 
the “Flesh-pots of Egypt” and fancy it comes from 
Shakespeare. If only you could know how often you 
are talking in quotation from the English Bible when 
you are not conscious of it ! 

It is not strange that those who have looked upon 
this book as inspired from the Most High, should 
almost have forgotten that it was a translation from 
another tongue, and should have fallen into the habit 
of thinking of the very words themselves in the Eng- 
lish form as having all the sanctity of the original. 
With many persons you will still notice a hesitancy 
in using certain phrases carelessly, because they be- 
long to the English Bible. 

Bibles are cheap nowadays, but they are not read 
nearly as much as they used to be. You can buy them 
for a song, even the handsomely bound copies. Most 
families own one or several copies. It is regarded a 
suitable birthday present for a young person. You in- 
scribe his name in it and your own. It is his Bible, 
and when he is grown up, if he is religiously inclined, 
he will take it with him in the summer when he goes 
traveling. But I fear that oftentimes he forgets to 
take it out of his trunk. Yet he has it there. But 
I can recall in my boyhood days in New England how 
it used to be a matter of pride when a youth could 
say that he had read every word in the Bible. There 
was a method laid down how it could be done in ex- 
actly one year, according to the specific number of 
chapters one might read each morning. After all, it 
was not a bad method, inasmuch as it did familiarize 
the youth with his English Bible. Yet the method had 
its drawbacks, for it has made many a young person, 
at the end of the year, close it with a sigh of relief, 
never to open it again. 

We must come to the confession : Those of us who 
love this book and wish it were read as of yore, know 
that in spite of the enormous number of copies printed, 
it is read very much less than it used to be. Go back 
in your fancy, if you will, to the century before Shakes- 


20 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


peare in England. The people over there are “prac- 
tical” men and women, and we would not suppose 
they had been much given to subjective piety, save in 
unusual instances. 

And yet, can you appreciate the fact that in that 
century there was many and many an individual who 
would walk miles of an evening, to go to some room 
where he would meet a crowd of others of his own 
kind, and there they would sit huddled together listen- 
ing to some one who read to them by a candle-light 
from the English Bible? For the most part, the men 
themselves could not read. But they listened and 
listened, with an earnestness and intensity which we 
can scarcely understand at the present day. 

Can you take in the circumstances that churches 
were crowded by persons who came, for what — do 
you suppose? To hear some popular preacher? No. 
They came for the sole purpose of hearing the Bible 
read aloud to them. And these were not persons be- 
ing educated to become clergymen. They were hard- 
working men — artisans, laborers, or, it may be, well- 
to-do men of affairs who had money, but had no edu- 
cation. They came by the thousands, just to hear 
this book read aloud and to find out what was in it. 

How shall we explain the fact? Who shall tell the 
secret of those mighty meetings in rude quarters, with 
eager faces and eager minds, listening to the Bible be- 
ing read to them as a child to-day would listen to an 
exciting story or fairy tale? 

I am not giving you any exaggerated or fancy 
sketch, but a true picture of what was going on in that 
century just before Shakespeare, or even at his time. 
Two forms of culture were open to the people, the 
stage and the Bible; and both, for upward of a hun- 
dred years, appear to have been equally popular. 

But why? Well, for one reason, because it was a 
new world, because men had lived in darkness so 
long that there was a passionate craving for light, 
just mere light of any kind. It was not exclusively 
the religious spirit which induced men to go long 
distances, or to stand by the hour in crowds in the 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


21 


churches of London to hear this Bible read. No, it 
was the new world which was being opened to them. 
Christendom was awakening from the dark ages, 
when culture, education and knowledge had been 
shut away in monasteries, when many a lordly baron 
who ruled towns or cities could not read or write. 

There were no newspapers in those days, no private 
libraries, no book-shelf in each home. Remember 
that printing as an art had only just come into 
existence. Four years before Columbus set out on 
his first voyage across the Atlantic, there came from 
the printing press the first edition of the Hebrew 
Bible — not the English version, you understand, but 
the Bible in Hebrew. 

Furthermore, it was the conviction of the large 
majority of the scholars and clergy of the day that it 
was not safe . to put the Bible in the hands of the 
people. An effort of that kind would have shocked 
them as much as a suggestion to give them the 
franchise. It meant democracy, and that meant an- 
archy, in the theories of the statesman or the scholar 
of those days. 

All the while the man of the people knew that there 
was a book written in an unknown tongue, containing 
wonderful knowledge, having had an enormous in- 
fluence, expounding the mysteries of this life and the 
life to come, revealing truths about man and nature 
and God. All of this the man of the people had heard 
of. It was talked about more or less as a great 
mystery which he was not allowed to know anything 
of, a sealed book into which he was not to look. 

The fear on the part of the scholar or statesman 
was not so strange when we think of it. Surely it was 
a bold and venturesome step which should place the 
Bible in the hands of the people, to let them think 
for themselves as to what it contained or what its 
doctrines meant. It would set up each man for his 
own church, his own guide in religion — yes, even his 
own state and his own law-giver. We can well ap- 
preciate the exclamation quoted from one of the men 


22 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


of that day: “We must root out the English Bible 
or it will root us out.” That was the fear. 

But be that as it may be, for one or two centuries in 
English history, there was an eagerness almost pas- 
sionate in extent to read and know about the Bible. 
And it was in that age when this simple language of 
the English Bible passed among the people, and 
when its greatest influence in certain ways was ex- 
erted. To them at that time, it was the one source 
of light and enlightenment. In letting in the knowl- 
edge of the old world, it let in the new light of the 
new world. 

Beyond any question, it was largely responsible for 
the new individualistic movement of the modern 
world. I do not think it can be doubted that the 
English Bible was the forerunner of democracy. If 
we have republican institutions in the United States 
of America at the present time, if we have a free ballot, 
if there is an opportunity for us to manage our own 
affairs to some extent as a people, if we rest our 
faith on the Declaration of Independence — then we 
may safely assert that all this has come, more than 
from any other one cause, through the direct or in- 
direct influence of the English Bible. Through it 
and its influence, and not from Voltaire and Rous- 
seau, did we get our immortal Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. I am speaking now of the Bible simply 
as a human instrument, as an influence like all other 
influences, while pointing out to you how paramount 
this peculiar influence has been. 

But when I come to the question which is before me 
over and over again, Why is it that people nowadays 
study their Shakespeare, their Goethe or their Dante, 
and will not study or read their Bibles? I own to 
being sorely perplexed. 

Why is it, do you ask? I will make one suggestion 
as the reason for it : You take down your copy which 
you have bought. You have heard it said “it is all 
the Bible, read it, read the whole Bible.” And you 
open and you read : 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


23 


“These are the generations of Shem : Shem was an hundred 
years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood. And 
Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and 
begat sons and daughters. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty 
years, and begat Selah. And Arphaxad lived after he begat 
Selah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daugh- 
ter. And Selah lived thirty years and begat Eber. And 
Selah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years 
and begat sons and daughters. And Eber lived four and thirty 
years and begat Peleg. And Eber lived after he begat Peleg 
four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters. 
And Peleg lived thirty years and begat Reu. And Peleg lived 
after he begat Reu two hundred and nine years, and begat sons 
and daughters.” 

You lay down your book and say to yourself : 
“Well, and this is the Bible?” “Yes,” I answer, “a 
part of it.” And you have been told that it was all 
alike, the sacred book, all equally beautiful, equally 
valuable, equally instructive, all bound under the 
same cover. 

But there is the mistake. It is that which has made 
the Bible largely an unread book among vast 
numbers of people at the present time — the impres- 
sion which has gone abroad, that all parts of this 
sacred literature are equally good and just alike, all 
parts equally instructive, equally inspired. 

Suppose you take down your copy again in spite 
of your discouragement, and begin once more to read 
further along. You may be more fortunate the next 
time. Perhaps you are tired with life, and this may 
have led you to look into the Bible. And you be- 
gin to read : 

“For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great 
mercies will I gather thee. In overflowing wrath I hid my 
face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness 
will I have mercy on thee. The mountains shall depart and 
the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from 
thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed. Oh, 
thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold, 
I will set thy stones in fair colours, and lay thy foundations 
with sapphires. And great shall be the peace of thy children. 
In righteousness shalt thou be established; thou shalt be far 
from oppression; for thou shalt not fear; and from terror; 
for it shall not come near thee.” 


24 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


You put down your book for a moment and begin 
to think. You say: “This is something else.” You 
may have been discouraged or disheartened, feeling 
as if life were not much worth living. Here was a 
man who had gone through the same experience ; but 
what a long while ago! Here was a man who knew 
just how you feel now, with the difference that he got 
over his melancholy and began to hope. And this 
is his voice of hope. Before you know it, if you have 
let yourself go, and lost yourself in the mood of what 
you are reading, you may begin to have hope too. 
Hope in what, you ask? I answer, “Nothing in par- 
ticular; just hope.” A new kind of music has struck 
your ear. The hopeful attitude of another soul is 
sounded in yours, and you begin to catch it in spite 
of yourself. Perhaps you say, “there is more in the 
Bible than I thought. It is not all ‘genealogies.’ ” 

You turn over and read: 

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you ; not as 
the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be 
troubled, neither let it be afraid.” 

You put your book down again and you say to 
yourself, “there is another kind of peace, is there? 
A kind which money does not buy?” It may be a 
new suggestion to you, although the Bible is full of 
such suggestiveness. You try once more further 
along. You may strike more genealogies, or you 
may come upon dry statements of doctrines, discus- 
sions which you may not be interested in. Or perhaps 
you will meet with sentences like these : 

“Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is 
evil, cleave to that which is good. Be kindly affectioned one 
toward another with brotherly love, in honour preferring one 
another. Bless them which persecute you ; bless and curse not. 
Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that 
weep. Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not 
high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Recompense 
to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of 
all men. If it be possible as much as lieth within you, live 
peaceably with all men. Be not overcome of evil, but over- 
come evil with good.” 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


25 


Now that is a good doctrine, is it not? Yiou would 
be glad to have other people practice it toward you, 
even if you were not inclined to practice it towards 
others. You would like to have your children learn 
such maxims, would you not; and to follow that ad- 
vice in a general way ? 

You may turn to your Bible and not find the 
words I am reading. But they are there. Only as I 
go along, I omit one verse and give another, sound- 
ing those notes which please me, and ignore the other 
parts. I have read the Bible a good deal, and know 
how to do that. I should do the same with my Plato. 
There is dross in my philosophers also ; tiresome 
speeches, clauses or sentences or whole paragraphs 
which show an attitude of mind shaped wholly by 
the conditions of the age. Then there are other para- 
graphs that seemed inspired, as if my philosophers 
arose above all ages, or all special influences, and spoke 
through the universal heart of man. 

So it is with my English Bible. 

You may ask, where did this English Bible come 
from? Who translated it. And somebody else sit- 
ting by your side will say, “Why, it is the ‘author- 
ized version,’ translated under the direction of King 
James, and published at the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, in 1611.” 

Well, your neighbor sitting beside you, in telling 
you this, knows something; but his little knowledge 
has made it a dangerous thing for him. The English 
Bible does not belong to the seventeenth century, 
nor did it come from the beginning of the seventeenth 
century. 

There were three great and most important trans- 
lations of the Bible into the English language, from 
which all our English Bibles in popular use are lin- 
eally descended ; and one of those three was not this 
“Authorized Version.” 

I hold in my hands a copy of a work which was 
the starting point for the English Bible. But the 
date of it, I find on examination, to be 1530, eighty 
years or more before the publication of the “version” 


26 THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 

you know about. It is not the whole Bible, but only 
the first five books. Yet the same man who issued 
these five books of the Pentateuch, issued a translation 
of the whole Bible. All our other English versions 
in popular use are lineally descended from this trans- 
lation, made by a man whose name was William Tyn- 
dale. He was the one who was revealing the mys- 
teries of that sealed literature to the crude artisan or 
tiller of the soil, and who was by this means making 
an individual soul out of a clod — if that be not too 
exaggerated a form of speech. It was Tyndale who 
really gave the English tone or Anglo-Saxonism to 
the English Bible. 

We speak of our “King James Version” as of a 
new and different translation. Now compare the 
first words of the first chapter of Genesis, as trans- 
lated by Tyndale, and see how they read, contrasting 
them in your mind with the first words of the “author- 
ized version” which you know so well : 

“In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the 
earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the deep, 
and the spirit of God moved upon the waters. Then God said, 
‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw the 
light that it was good, and divided the light from the darkness, 
and called the light ‘Day’ and the darkness ‘Night;’ and so of 
the evening and morning was made the first day.” 

Surely the variations from this in the King James 
version are not so remarkable. The last line reads, 
for instance, “And the evening and morning were 
the first day,” instead of “Of the evening and morn- 
ing was made the first day.” 

But the style of speech, the Anglo-Saxon flavor, 
was given by Tyndale. 

To be sure, the spelling is quaint and quite unlike 
what we see nowadays. “Beginning” is spelled “Be- 
gynnynge.” “Deep” is spelled “depe.” “Earth” lacks 
the “a” and is spelled “erth.” “Light” is spelled 
“lyghte,” and “darkness” is spelled “darcknesse.” 

But if you were to see the spelling of the so-'called 
“authorized version” exactly as it appeared in 1611, 
you would also be rather surprised. Look at a copy 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


27 


of the New Testament from that version printed pre- 
cisely as it was then, and you find the word “son” 
spelled “sonne.” “Fourteen” is spelled “foureteen.” 
But on the whole, English spelling was at the point 
of settling down to an established shape about the 
time when the King James version was issued. 

Here is an interesting volume in my hands which 
gives me six translations of the New Testament. 
You can get it in any of our large public libraries. 
But, as I have said, only three are important, and 
in those three I do not include the last or “author- 
ized” one. 

The second one I have in mind goes by the name 
of the “Rheims and Douay” version. This was the 
English version made for the Roman Catholic 
Church, and done by refugees from England during 
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. We usually speak of 
the “refugees” from England in the reign of Queen 
Mary, as if the Roman Catholic Church had done 
all the persecuting. But the Roman Catholics them- 
selves were not living in a bed of roses in England 
in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Many of them 
found it wiser and safer to live in other lands at that 
time. 

I should be glad if there was time or space to say 
something of this other version. It is like, and yet quite 
unlike, that by Tyndale. It was made chiefly from 
the so-called Latin Vulgate, and not from the original 
Greek or Hebrew. The “Vulgate,” as you know, 
was a translation of the Scriptures made about four 
hundred years after the Christian era in the Latin 
language by St. Jerome, and has been accepted as the 
authorized Bible by the Roman Catholic Church. 

Those who are acquainted with the history of 
church doctrines would see in the two translations 
the important distinctions in the use of language. 
As, for instance, where Tyndale uses the word “re- 
pent,” you find in the Rheims and Douay version, 
“Do penance.” It was over that issue that the 
Reformation started. Whereas the Roman Catholic 
Church had given an objective interpretation to the 


28 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


original word, and thus laid the importance on 
“works;” Martin Luther had given a subjective ren- 
dering to it as “repentance,” throwing the emphasis 
on “faith,” and so launched the Reformation. 

The other translation belongs to a much earlier 
epoch, two hundred years, in fact, before that made 
by Tyndale. It was done by a monk, John Wyclif, 
and the language is so quaint that one would only half 
understand it, even if it were read with modern pro- 
nunciation. It, too, was made from the Vulgate, and 
not from the original Greek and Hebrew. 

I scarcely need to tell you of the history of the 
Authorized Version. It was made under the general 
direction of King James at the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, at the time of the last years of Shakes- 
peare’s life. A large number of men worked at it. 
For this reason it lacks the unity of style which seems 
to characterize certain of the other versions. Some 
portions of the translation are better than others, and 
in certain places the English is less fine than in others. 
But, as a rule, it is the most perfect style and the most 
beautiful rhetoric in the English language. 

There have been a number of translations of the 
Bible made within the last two hundred years, by one 
or another scholar or group of scholars. Yet none of 
them have ever become at all popular. Not one of 
them has the music, I fancy, which belongs to this 
rightly named “Engilsh” Bible. 

To be sure, language had changed, and all our words 
do not have quite the same form or meaning which 
they had two hundred years ago. Some persons are 
not aware of the fact that the “authorized version,” 
published in 1611, does not anywhere contain the 
possessive pronoun “its,” as that word was only just 
then coming into usage, and occurs only a few times 
in all the writings of Shakespeare. Besides this, since 
that time new manuscripts have been discovered, and 
a better text in the original languages has been estab- 
lished. Hence, it almost seemed as if, in this century, 
a clamor had gone forth for a new version of the 
Bible. About thirty years ago, therefore, it was 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


29 


agreed upon among a group of scholars in England 
and this country to make a new translation which they 
hoped would be adopted by the orthodox Protestant 
churches of Christendom. A large number of men en- 
tered on the work. 

Never was an undertaking carried out more thor- 
oughly, devotedly and painstakingly than this last “re- 
vised version” of the Bible. It was given forth to the 
world about ten years ago — I forget the exact date — 
after it had been waited for with an eagerness quite 
extraordinary. When the New Testament was pub- 
lished first, before the rest of the “revised” transla- 
tion, it sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies. 
Positively there seemed to be an interest in it some- 
what similar to that in the sixteenth century, when the 
Bible was first made known to the people of England. 
When the new version of the Old Testament was pub- 
lished, however, the book dealers who had expected 
to reap a harvest from it had a hard time of it. 

As a matter of fact, the revised version, so-called, 
has been pretty nearly a failure. From a business stand- 
point, it fell flat on the market. At a Bible publishing 
house I was told not long ago that not one per cent, of 
the Bibles sold in the English language at this time 
are copies of this revised version. Yet the work 
was honestly done, far more carefully and painstak- 
ingly than the regular authorized version made in the 
reign of King James. And no one has been quite 
able to explain the reason for it. Some say it is habit 
or the custom which makes people cling to what they 
have been used to. Others say it is the price which 
makes the difference, as the revised version has cost 
more. But at the bottom, I doubt very much whether 
either reason accounts for the circumstance. I sus- 
pect the translation was a failure, for the reason that 
it made too few changes to satisfy the scholars and too 
many changes to satisfy the people. Those who knew 
their Bible were used to its phraseology, and they saw 
no great reason for changing it. Some of the altera- 
tions in the revised version affect us as we should be 


30 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


affected if efforts were made to alter certain parts of 
the familar airs, like “Auld Lang Syne.” 

For example, in the 23d Psalm, which is known, 
perhaps, more than all the others, and committed to 
memory by people all over the English-speaking 
world, what was the use of changing one word in the 
verse, “He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness 
for his name’s sake,” and substituting, “He guideth 
me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake ?” 
The difference in sense was not enough to make it 
worth while to break up the familiar music of the old 
words. The revised version does not give a literal 
translation on the one hand; and yet, on the other 
hand, it breaks up a part of the beautiful paraphras- 
ing of the original authorized version. 

A few important changes had to be made. The 
most conspicuous one I know of, happens to be in the 
speech of St. Paul, where he is addressing King 
Agrippa, and the king replies — in the older version — 
“Almost persuadest thou me to be a Christian.” This 
was, as we know now, exactly contrary to the real 
sense, which has been rendered in the revised version 
correctly, “With but little persuasion thou would’st 
fain make me a Christian” — spoken, of course, in a 
sneering tone. 

For practical purposes it would have been sufficient 
to have reissued the King James Version, with all- 
told, perhaps, twelve or fifteen alterations or omis- 
sions. In both versions we are not dealing with lit- 
eral translations, but with an “English” Bible. 

In these lectures I quote sometimes from one and 
sometimes from the other. The only real translation 
of the Bible into the English language will be the one 
now being made as the crowning feature of the new 
scholarship at the close of the nineteenth century. Of 
that I shall speak in a future lecture. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


31 


THE ORIGINAL BIBLE 


A long while ago, it may have been a hundred years 
or several hundred years before this time — I do not 
know the exact time — it seems that a number of 
men were exploring near the summit of a high moun- 
tain and came on some sea shells lying there. We 
call them nowadays fossils. And what were those 
sea shells doing there on the top of a mountain? 
“Why, the devil put them there,” was the answer, 
“in order to perplex the scholars and lead them to 
make fools of themselves with more theories.” “No,” 
replied the scholars, “nature put them there, just as 
nature shaped the mountain tops. It was all one 
work.” 

“Then how did those sea shells come there?” was 
the query. “It is plain enough,” was the reply. 
“There is only one possible answer. At one time 
those mountain tops were at the bottom of the sea.” 
In response to this the scholars or men of science 
received only a smile of contempt. Such talk was 
not worth listening to or arguing with. It was to 
be let alone. 

But it has all been setttled now beyond dispute. The 
mountain tops have been at the bottom of the sea. 
And it was then that the shells found their way there. 
No educated man doubts this. We all take it for 
granted. The smile of contempt has ceased. The 
theory was finally argued out and settled. 

We call these sea shells fossils, meaning by this, 
evidences of organic life which may now seem out 
of place. And chiefly by means of these fossils the 
man of science has read the story of the earth. He 
knows the history of our planet ten millions or one 
hundred million years ago, almost as well as he knows 
the early history of the human race. 

“But what has all this to do with the Bible?” you 
ask. “A great deal,” we reply, “because just such 


32 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


fossils exist there too, and it has been by means of 
such fossils that the scholars have read and recon- 
structed the Bible.” To-day we know more about 
the way it grew or was put together than we know 
about the growth and development of the plays of 
Shakespeare. It is astounding to think it. But it 
is a fact, nevertheless. 

It has come for the most part within the last one 
hundred years, and the major portion of it within 
the last twenty-five years ; at least, so far as the popu- 
lar acceptance of it is concerned. 

When the new standpoint concerning the structure 
of the Bible was first put forth, it was looked upon 
naturally as a grotesque theory and was answered 
by the same smile of contempt. By and by, when 
it took larger proportions and became more impor- 
tant, it was regarded as a dangerous attitude which 
conscientious, devout believers in the Bible must 
not pay any attention to. 

But to-day all is changed. The standpoint I am 
going to describe for you has won its way within 
the folds of orthodoxy. It no longer ranks as heresy 
for a man to accept it. The best authorities for it 
in the English-speaking world on the whole are 
within the fold of the orthodox church. And if you 
wanted books on the subject explaining it, support- 
ing it and advocating it, I should refer you to the 
works now published by the orthodox clergy, men in 
good and regular standing within their respective de- 
nominations. I do not mean to say that all the 
clergy have accepted it, by any manner of means. A 
great many of them hold to the old attitude as before. 
But the new standpoint has ceased to rank as “her- 
esy.” What is more, it is most surprising to observe 
the unanimity of opinion, on the whole, among those 
scholars who accept the new method at all. I do not 
mean to say that they agree on all the minor points, 
any more than you will find that the men of science 
agree on all points concerning the history of the 
earth. 

But taking it altogether, the agreement of opinion is 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


33 


positively astonishing. Where the divergence among 
the scholars is most apparent is with reference to 
the latter portion of the Bible which we call the New 
Testament. This would seem strange, inasmuch as 
the New Testament is nearer to us and we ought to 
be able to come closer to the circumstances which 
lead to its appearance. But it may be that more is 
involved in admitting this other attitude with refer- 
ence to the New Testament. 

The new attitude or new method of studying the 
sacred literature goes, as you know, under the name 
of the Higher Criticism. I like the term because it 
implies a conviction on the part of the scholars that 
it is a higher way of looking at the Bible. With it 
comes an interpretation which makes the Bible more 
instructive, more valuable, more worthy of regard 
than ever before, and therefore it is a “higher” 
method. 

It has certainly given us another Bible from the 
traditional one. It leaves us all — whether we are rad- 
ical or conservative, within or without the folds of 
orthodoxy, belonging to the church or apart from 
the church — it leaves us all free to approach that lit- 
erature with the same regard or same awe or same 
reverence. And it is a gratifying fact that in the 
new version of the Bible which is being issued, the 
“Polychrome” Bible, the translators have been chosen 
without regard to sect or church, solely by their rank 
as scholars. What is more, we find the thoroughgo- 
ing rationalist who may not believe in inspiration, 
and the thoroughgoing conservative who believes in 
inspiration just as before, each paying a like regard 
to the opinions of the other. Plainly it would look as if 
the doctrine of inspiration of the Bible was not neces- 
sarily concerned in the outcome between the strug- 
gle of the old and new standpoints. 

I have said that they have been reading the story 
of the Bible, its history, the way it grew or finally 
was put together, by means of the fossils there. I 
am using this term reverently, meaning by it the 
detached or misplaced pages in that literature, those 


34 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


which stand out isolated, as it were, by themselves. 
One such sublime “fossil,' ” for instance, is the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, in certain respects the finest por- 
tion of the whole sacred literature. 

This Sermon on the Mount, beyond all question, 
comes nearer to the original teachings of Jesus 
than anything else in all the Scriptures. We find 
allusion to it from the very earliest times of the 
Christian era, where there is a reference to certain 
“logia” or “sayings” recorded by Matthew. These 
sayings, which pass as the “Sermon on the Mount,” 
and which form such a striking portion of the Bible, 
stand out by themselves as a landmark, and undoubt- 
edly give us the kernel or core of the New Testa- 
ment. Whatever else we may trust in the Scriptures, 
we can put supreme confidence in those sayings as 
coming close to the original Jesus. The Hebrews of 
those days had, as they continue to have, a wonder- 
ful facility for remembering sayings or precepts which 
had been given to them ; while on the other hand 
they had a like facility for getting themselves into 
a hopeless confusion in their memories concerning 
the facts of history. Their enthusiasm was for the 
precepts and for the teachings. It may have been a 
characteristic of the religious temperament of the 
Hebrew of those times. It is on this ground that 
we put so much faith in their traditions concerning 
the precepts or teachings of their sacred Scripture. 

But be that as it may, it was the problem of the 
scholars to get back to the original Bible. And this 
has been the purpose of the Higher Criticism. One 
might suppose that all this would have been easy 
enough. It only remained, one suggests, for them 
to go to the original manuscripts, find the original 
text, study it carefully and then make an honest trans- 
lation of it. What more could we ask for ? 

True enough. But what about those original 
texts? The material on which people wrote in the 
days when the Bible came into existence was chiefly 
from the papyrus plant, and unfortunately it had lit- 
tle durability, decaying or rotting away in the course 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


35 


of about a hundred years. Not until long after the 
Bible had been written did there come into use the new 
form of parchment, which had positive durability. 
This, so far as we know, dates back to about the 
fourth century after Christ. Hence all the original 
manuscripts are in dust. Not one of them had sur- 
vived or could have survived. 

As a matter of fact, the oldest manuscript of the He- 
brew Bible dates back from about the year 1000 A. D., 
some 1,200 years after the canon of Hebrew Scrip- 
tures was completed. What is more, the orthodox 
Christian church had lost interest in the Hebrew 
language. But by good fortune the old Hebrew text 
had been preserved pretty faithfully among the 
schools of the Jewish Church. Just about the time 
when Columbus was starting out on his voyage of 
discovery of America, a copy of the Hebrew Bible 
came, as we said in the previous lecture, for the first 
time from the printing press. And a few years after- 
ward there was published in printed form a copy of 
the Greek New Testament. 

But bear in mind that the Greek language had 
been ignored for centuries, that manuscripts of any 
kind from the original Greek New Testament must 
have been scarce in the extreme, and you will see 
what a difficulty there was in presenting the original 
text in printed form. In fact, until about fifty years 
ago, the oldest complete manuscripts of the New Tes- 
tament dated from- the sixth or seventh century — a 
long while after Jesus had lived. And unfortunately 
those manuscripts themselves were not always in ac- 
cord. 

About forty years ago, however, a great discov- 
ery was made. A German scholar was staying for 
a time at a monastery at Mt. Sinai. He noticed while 
there some old pieces of vellum or parchment lying 
in a waste basket ready to be burned. Already the 
contents of two other baskets had gone into the 
stove. He pulled out a sheet of that vellum and gave 
a start, more than a start. He saw that he had before 
him a page from a Greek Bible earlier than any 


36 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


known up to that time. I need not tell you the 
further details of the romantic story of that discov- 
ery; how it took nearly ten or twenty years of plan- 
ning and searching for our scholar to get hold of 
that old manuscript or what remained of it. But 
at last he succeeded. It contained the whole of the 
New Testament with one or two other books not 
now belonging to that part of the Bible, but to which 
there had been references in the writings of the 
Church Fathers. And it contained also quite a large 
portion of the Old Testament, although with un- 
fortunate interruptions in the text, where the sheets 
had been thrown into the stove. The whole manu- 
script was afterward published to the world and ranks 
now as the “Codex Sinaiticus.” To-day it is ac- 
cepted as the oldest complete manuscript of the Bible 
in existence, coming from about the middle of the 
fourth century, 350 A. D.* 

“Now, at any rate,” one would say, “there was a 
chance to get at the original Bible. At last a text had 
been found which had been written only three or four 
hundred years after the beginning of the Christian era. 
All that was necessary was to translate it carefully and 
give it to the world, and the original Bible would be 
in our hands.” But think a moment! Let me give 
you an impression of the way one of the paragraphs 
or pages of that manuscript would have looked if it 
had been in the English language. I take this from 
an article on the “Codex Sinaiticus” in one of our 
Encyclopedias : 

WAREOFMENFORTHEY 

WILLDELIVERYOUUP 

TOTHECOU 1 NCILSAND 

THEYWILLSCOURGE 

YOUINTHEIRSYNA 

GOGUEsANDYESHALL 

BEBROUGHTBEFORE 

GOVERNORsANDKINGs 

FORMYSAKEFORATES 

*The Vatican Codex, which is less complete for the New Tes- 

tament is somewhat older than the Sinaitic. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


37 


Do you find it easy to read? The type is large 
enough, surely. “Yes,” you ask, “but where are the 
punctuation marks ?” Quite true ; that is what I should 
like to know. “Why aren’t the words separated from 
each other? How can we know just where one word 
ends and another begins always?” True, that is what 
I should like to ask. 

Perhaps you may or may not have been aware that 
in the original form in which the books of the Bible 
were written there were no punctuation marks, no 
capitals or small letters ; not only that, but no divi- 
sions between the words. In this manuscript there 
is here and there an occasional mark, showing the 
fact that punctuation points were just coming into 
use, although only to a very slight degree. 

Do you begin to see some of the difficulty in get- 
ting at the original Bible? Fancy the text of Shakes- 
peare without a punctuation mark in it, with the 
words all run together and no separating spaces be- 
tween them. Would it be easy to read your Shapes- 
peare, and always know just what it meant? 

No, it would mean work and an enormous amount 
of it. And it has meant work on a colossal scale 
for the scholars to get back to the original text of 
the Bible and to find out what it meant. Further- 
more, keep the other points of difficulty in view. 
The New Testament was written in a language which 
was not spoken by Jesus. Besides this, the people 
in Palestine at the time of Jesus no longer spoke 
Hebrew. It had become to a degree a dead lan- 
guage. At that time the language in use in Pales- 
tine, as you know, was the Aramaic. Already in 
that day the copies of the sacred Scriptures in popu- 
lar use were in the Greek language. About 150 
years B. C. there had been a translation of the He- 
brew literature made chiefly for the Hebrews living 
down in Egypt. It goes under the name of the “Sep- 
tuagint,” from the Greek number 72, coming from the 
tradition that seventy-two Jewish scholars had 
worked upon it, six men appointed from each of the 
twelve tribes. And the story runs that each one of 


38 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


the seventy-two was put into a separate cell or room 
and made to translate the whole sacred literature, and 
that when they all came together it was discovered 
that every man of them had translated it word for 
word exactly alike. All very pretty as a tradition! 
Only as the scholar knows, parts of it had been 
wretchedly translated and make no sense at all, un- 
less the original Hebrew is compared in order to 
help out the sense. 

Besides this, and illustrating another difficulty, this 
Septuagint or Greek translation of the Scriptures as 
we now know, contained quite a number of books 
which do not now belong to the English Bible. A hun- 
dred years ago, to be sure, if you had been living 
then and gone to purchase a copy, you would have 
found at the end of the Old Testament a number of 
other books printed, perhaps, in smaller type. But 
they have been dropped out from the English Bible 
altogether. This within only ioo years ! They went 
under the name of the “Apocrypha.” 

When, therefore, the new scholars set out with the 
task of getting back to the original Bible, they had 
a situation about like this : There was the Latin 
translation, the Vulgate, made in the fourth century, 

A. D., which had come down, however, in imperfect 
manuscripts, and with the copies sadly varying from 
each other in certain particulars, although on the whole 
fairly well preserved. There was this Greek trans- 
lation from the Old Testament, made about 150 years 

B. C., and existing in manuscripts which had been 
written about 300 or 400 years A. D. And along 
with this there were the Hebrew manuscripts dating 
from about the year 1000 A. D. of the Hebrew Bible. 
Out of this material it devolved upon them, as I have 
said, to read the story of the Bible just as the man 
of science reads the story of the earth. And they 
have done it in a way that fairly dazes us when we 
appreciate the difficulties. 

At first it might have been said that all that re- 
mained was to formulate a good text as near as pos- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


39 


sible to the original and then translate it. But that 
was not all. 

The chief problem for the new scholarship was not 
so much to get at the original text, but to study 
the strata of history when these books were written. 
Tradition had said, for instance, that whatever was 
found in the book of Isaiah had been written by 
Isaiah. Does the book say so? Yet, for a time, it was 
heresy to assume that parts of the book of Isaiah be- 
longed to several different authors. 

And what has been the first result of the researches 
of these scholars? Why, it has been to discover that 
in the way we have the English Bible now, there is very 
little chronological order. In certain portions it would 
almost seem as if somebody had accidentally dropped 
the separate leaves of the manuscripts from a house- 
top and they had been scattered all over the ground, 
and then had been picked up at random and put to- 
gether without regard to order. It is not quite as bad 
as this, to be sure, but something of that nature. 

I open at the beginning of my Bible and I read 
the story of the Garden of Eden. It is a beautiful 
story, fascinating of its kind, and most instructive. 
Here it is on the second page of my volume. Ac- 
cording to tradition — tradition, mind you — this was 
the earliest portion of the Bible written. Then I go 
on toward the end of the Old Testament until I 
come to those books which go under the name of 
Prophecies. According to tradition these were writ- 
ten at a later time. I look over a number of these 
prophecies, some of the longest of them. I read 
them with care; yet I do not find a single reference 
in them to the story of the Garden of Eden, or to 
“Adam and Eve.” That is strange, passing strange, 
is it not? Over and over again we find references to 
“Moses,” and the experiences of the Israelites in 
Egypt, their crossing the Red Sea and their troubles 
in the “Wilderness.” But search as we may, appar- 
ently we come on no allusions to Adam and Eve, 
our first parents, nor the beautiful Garden of Eden. 

What shall we make of it? If we were dealing with 


40 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


any other book, which had not been encrusted with 
various theories or traditions, we should take it for 
granted that those prophets had never heard of the 
Garden of Eden, or of Adam and Eve; that the part 
of the Bible where you find that account had not yet 
been written, or as yet had not formed a part of the 
sacred literature of a Bible. The new scholarship 
will tell you as practically certain that Moses him- 
self had never heard of the Garden of Eden nor of 
Adam and E've. This chapter which contains the 
story I am speaking of, they will tell you now, was 
compiled beyond question after many of the great 
prophets had lived. If it were placed in its normal 
position and the Bible were arranged according to 
the dates at which the chapters were written, that 
particular chapter would come in nearer the end of the 
Old Testament, and the Prophecies nearer the begin- 
ning. 

Is this destructive? No; on the contrary, it is re- 
constructive. From this standpoint it is possible to 
see what the Bible means, to get a consistency out 
of it. 

We turn again to the historic books and read some 
of the fascinating chapters concerning Saul and 
David. They are in what we call the books of “Sam- 
uel” and the books of the “Kings.” Then we open 
to long series of chapters called the “Chronicles.” 
Here are other accounts of David 'and Saul. But 
on examination the pictures here of the character of 
these men are not in accord with the pictures of 
them which we found in the other chapters which we 
have mentioned. Yet these various chapters or books 
all come right along together, Samuel, Kings, Chron- 
icles, as if they had been written at the same time. 
What are we to think — that the writers of the same 
age were dispting within each other and telling false- 
hoods to each other ? It would certainly seem perplex- 
ing. In fact, the whole attitude of the author of the 
Chronicles seems other than that of the author of 
Samuel and Kings. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


41 


But it is also .plain enough now when this higher 
criticism steps in and shows us that the second nar- 
rative was written perhaps two or three centuries after 
the first. It would be just as if there were two histories 
of early times in England, one of which had been 
written in the sixteenth century and the other in the 
eighteenth. Now, in a certain respect the earlier his- 
tory would be more accurate, as it comes nearer to 
the events described. But it might also have been 
written at a time when men were more careless about 
investigation. On the other hand, the second his- 
tory may have been written farther away from the 
original events and the author have found himself 
in greater difficulty in trying to get at the facts. But 
he may be a more careful chronicler, so that in other 
directions his history may be more trustworthy. But, 
furthermore, we must take care in studying such his- 
tories. The author in each case may have a religious 
bias. In one instance the writer may have been a 
Roman Catholic and in the other instance a Protes- 
tant. They may both be equally honest, and yet in 
spite of themselves the difference of attitude will be 
perceptible and the way they narrate their facts will 
depend on their religious views. 

When the new scholars began to study the book 
of Chronicles and compare it with the book of Kings 
or Samuel, it was very plain indeed — this religious 
bias of the respective authors. Instead of making 
these books teach less history, this method makes 
them teach more — when the scholar steps in and 
explains the situation of the age when the book was 
written. In point of fact, one might almost say that 
the Bible from this other standpoint is being used 
more now to explain history than it ever was before. 
But it is used more as a means for presenting a true 
picture of the times when it was written, than neces- 
sarily of the facts which it describes. 

If you think you can open your Bible from this 
other standpoint and read a paragraph or a page 
anywhere and understand it, I must ask you to be 
on your guard. Read it, of course! But it is just 


42 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


as with your Shakespeare. You can botch it woe- 
fully if you have not learned how to read the Bible, 
precisely as you can botch your Shakespeare if you 
have not gradually been taught how to read his plays. 

I want to give you an illustration of the careless 
use of the Bible, and it will be the best one I could 
give also in order to bring out this new method of in- 
terpretation by which we have re-read the whole story 
of the Bible. 

You have all heard more or less in talk or argu- 
ment, or you may have read it in books or newspa- 
pers, something in the Bible concerning a man who 
was swallowed by a whale and how this man stayed 
inside of the whale for three days and was finally 
spewed out upon the land still alive. 

The book which goes under the title of “Jonah” 
is one of the strange fosils I have been speaking of. 
It has been used over and over again by many a 
man, in order to show that he did not believe in the 
Bible, because he knew that a whale could not swal- 
low a man, and even if the whale had swallowed a 
man, that man could not stay inside such a creature 
and keep alive. On the other hand, it has been used 
likewise by those who wanted to assert their faith 
in the Bible and who have solemnly put forth the 
statement that they would have believed it if it had 
been said that Jonah swallowed the whale. As a 
result of all this, to a good many persons the trust- 
worthiness of the whole Bible turns around this 
whale-swalloing story. 

But now let us look rather attentively at this book 
of “Jonah.” Read it first, for it is short, only about 
a page in length. To begin with, right in the mid- 
dle of the chapter comes a prayer. On looking at 
it carefully it does not agree with the statements con- 
cerning it in the rest of the book. It is mentioned 
as a prayer made by Jonah while he was inside the 
fish. But on reading it you discover that it was a 
prayer of thanksgiving for having come out of the 
fish. “Yet hast thou brought up my life from the 
pit, O Lord my God.” It does not take much 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


43 


thought to observe, therefore, that this prayer is a 
psalm, and most clearly a “detached page,” not writ- 
ten by the author of the book at all, but simply pasted 
in there as expressing a feeling of his mind and 
therefore suitable for quotation, although without 
the quotation marks. At once, therefore, we elim- 
inate this passage from the rest of the book. 

In the next place we want to find out what the book 
was written for. “Oh/ 'you say, “at least hundreds 
and hundreds of thousands of people have said it 
was written to show the wonderful power of the Al- 
mighty, how He could hide a man away in the inside 
of a big fish in the sea and keep him there three days 
and have him come forth alive once more.” 

Suppose we decide first as to when this book was 
written. “This has been settled long ago,” one may 
assert. “It was writen when Nineveh was a prom- 
inent kingdom.” I turn to my “teachers’ Bible” and 
find that it tells me that in all probability the author 
wrote about the 9th century, B. C. All this is very 
interesting but very puzzling, if one happens to know 
much about the history of those times. To begin 
with, there is a reference to the “king of Nineveh.” 
Now steps in a man who happens to be a great scholar 
in Oriental lore, a man who knows a great deal about 
the history of Nineveh by original research, whose 
name was Sayce, and who tells us from his positive 
knowledge that at that time it was not customary 
to use such phraseology as “the king of Nineveh.” 
This mode of speech belonged to a much later epoch. 

But our scholars examine the language of the 
book. It is Hebrew — of a certain kind. But the lan- 
guage contains phrases from Aramaic, or the speech 
which was used in the time of Jesus in Palestine. 
The linguist knows the history of this language. He 
knows it was spoken by the people up north of Pal- 
estine, not among the Israelites at first. It was not 
until several centuries after the date assigned for the 
writing of Jonah, that this language crept down fur- 
ther south and came more and more into use among 
the Hebrews. The author is using phrases which 


44 jj 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


belonged to the 3rd and 4th centuries, and not 
the 8th and 9th centuries, B. C. This is enough 
to settle the fact once for all. The chapter from the 
Bible I am speaking of to you, contrary to tradition, is 
one of the very latest to have been written, and is 
rightly placed near the end of the Old Testament. 
Unfortunately it is followed by another short book 
called “Micah,” who was one of the very earliest 
writers of the Old Testament, and may have lived 
about the 8th or 9th century. Apparently there is no 
difficulty for the scholars in knowing that the language 
of these two books is centuries apart, that they belong 
side by side, just about as much as the “Faery Queen” 
by the poet Spenser, who died in about 1400, belongs 
side by side with the “Idylls of the King,” written by 
Tennyson in this century. 

Now having found out the approximate date when 
the book of Jonah was written, from the language 
and other incidental circumstances, our question 
arises, what was it written for? In order to settle 
this point, we must ask ourselves concerning the con- 
ditions among the people of Israel at that time. This 
will not be so difficult because we have approached 
an age of pretty plain history. We know what had 
been going on among that people for a length of 
time, how the priests and teachers had been working 
with might and main to make the laws among the 
people rigid in the extreme, to emphasize in the high- 
est degree the distinction between Jew and Gentile, 
to encourage the Jew to look with contempt and utter 
scorn upon all other races as being inferior and 
scarcely worth thinking of ; how race pride was being 
made the crucial point in religion; how this was nar- 
rowing Judaism, cutting it off from any possible in- 
fluence on the rest of the world, and threatening to 
make it a dead force so far as the future of culture 
and civilization was concerned. But it so happened 
that while that narrow sect was working with all 
its might and main to make those customs and those 
beliefs rigid in the extreme, a small school, per- 
haps very small indeed, was rising, with men who 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


45 


were taking the opposite attitude, and suggesting 
that the days for those rigid distinctions were coming 
to an end — pointing out that there was something 
higher and more important than race distinctions, 
that God was more than a God of the Jews, that He 
was a God of man. 

And at last this new standpoint of that small school 
found a voice in the book of Jonah. 

In this book, written about 300 years, it may be, 
before Christ, you have the one great sentiment of 
Jesus already anticipated; written so plain that all 
can see. There comes forth the extraordinary stand- 
point by which the author was fighting the narrow 
schools all around him as if he were exclaiming: 
“Almighty God knows naught of your Jew and your 
Gentile. Your race distinctions, your sense of su- 
periority, all that may be good or bad, according to 
circumstances. But all that is a human affair. In 
the eye of the Omnipotent, there is only one race, 
one human creature.” To quote from the book of 
Jonah: 

“And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for 
the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry even unto 
death. And the Lord said, Thou hast had pity on the gourd 
for the which thou hast not laboured, neither rnadest it to 
grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night; and 
should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city, wherein 
are more than six score thousand persons that cannot dis- 
cern between their right hand and their left hand?” 

In this we have the whole point of the book. 
It is the story of a man belonging to that narrow 
school of sectarianism who wanted God only for his 
race and his sect, and who looked upon all other hu- 
man creatures as belonging to an inferior order; a 
man who had gone to denounce the people of Nine- 
veh and to tell them of the destruction coming upon 
them because of their wickedness, and then was angry 
and disappointed when they repented, because the 
destruction did not come so that his prophecy might 
prove true. 

It means the turning point in the world’s history 
between race religion and universal religion, between 


46 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


the belief in a God of one race or one people, and the 
belief in a God of all racess or all peoples. “Thou 
hast had pity on the gourd , for the which thou hast 
not laboured, neither madest it to grow, and should 
not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city?” 

What has all this to do with the whale-swallowing 
story, you ask ; the “big fish” and how Jonah lived in- 
side of the big fish unharmed for three days and three 
nights ? 

Yes, I know all about that. I can recall, as perhaps 
you can also, how our old catechism used to run 
about like this : 

Who was the first man? Adam. Who was the first 
woman? Eve. Who was guilty of the first murder? 
Cain. Who escaped from the flood? Noah. Who 
lived inside of the whale for three days, kept alive by 
the Lord? Jonah. And what became of Jonah after- 
wards? Why he was spewed out by the whale on 
the dry land unharmed. What were the names of 
the three men who were cast into the fiery furnace? 
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. 

And so it went on. You know it all. I shall re- 
member those last three names, Shadrach, Meshach 
and Abednego until I die. That was the old con- 
ception of the Bible. And the story of Jonah was 
there to show the power of the Lord in keeping a 
man alive for three days inside of a whale. 

And because of that impression, many people have 
lost the notion as to the beauty or meaning of the 
books of the Bible, and the book of Jonah has be- 
come a laughing-stock to many, a debating point 
between the atheist and the orthodox believer. It 
has been said: What can the Bible be good for, if 
it is there to teach things like that? 

Suppose that “Shakespeare” was looked upon now- 
adays as a fetich, not read very much by grown peo- 
ple, but revered as something grand, inspiring, a 
good book to carry around with you to save you as 
a preservative from calamity ; a safeguard in the vest 
pocket from bullets in war or from drowning in 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


47 


time of peace. In all probability you would have a 
catechism for the young running like this : 

When did Shakespeare die? 1616. Where did 
he live part of the time? In London. How many 
plays did he write? Thirty-five may be one answer, 
forty another, — although on this question there would 
be bitterness of feeling almost to a point of death. 
What was the greatest play of Shakespeare? Ham- 
let. And what wonderful event is described in 
Hamlet? The appearance of a ghost. And who 
was the ghost? It was Hamlet’s father. When did 
this ghost appear? At midnight. When did he have 
to leave the scene? At the cock-crowing. What did 
the ghost say to Hamlet? How many times did the 
ghost appear? How did the ghost look? 

And then you would have as a result of all this, 
a certain school of wise men who would be running 
down Shakespeare and saying it was a pernicious 
book to put into the hands of the young, because it 
encouraged superstition, leading people to believe 
in ghosts when we know there are no ghosts; and 
that it was not a healthy book for sane people to 
read nowadays ; and that as for them, the wise ones, 
they were going to read something better where they 
should not come upon superstitions of this kind. 

Did Shakespeare believe in ghosts? I do not know 
and I do not care. It doesn’t make any difference 
whatever as to the significance of the play of Hamlet. 
People of those days did believe in ghosts, and he 
saw fit to give that setting to his play in order to 
bring out his thought. 

Did the author of Jonah believe that a man might 
be swallowed by a big fish, stay inside of the fish 
for three days in the sea and come out alive again? 
I do not know and I do not care. It doesn’t make 
any difference to me as to the meaning of this book 
by that author. I know perfectly well that in those 
days when he wrote, the mass of the people did be- 
lieve that just such events could happen as a matter 
of course: and it is plain that this author chose for 
reasons of his own to give this setting to his story 


48 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


<vhile bringing out his thought. But the point of it 
^11 is plain enough. It hasn’t anything to do with the 
whale-swallowing episode. 

Now which Bible shall we choose? That of the 
Higher Criticism, which gives us the thought of the 
Bible? Or the old-fashioned kind which gives us the 
wonders of the Bible? We shall have to make our 
choice. 

Here in my hands I hold a new translation of the 
Bible, made from those original texts, after the re- 
searches of the new scholars into the age when the 
books of the Bible were written. Being made by 
many scholars it will appear in many volumes, and 
perhaps not be completed for many years. But it is 
a marvelous piece of work and it is giving us the 
original Bible. The volume I hold in my hand is 
one of the many. It happens to be of the book which 
goes under the name of “Isaiah.” 

According to tradition, this whole book of Isaiah 
was written or spoken by one man, that one prophet. 
But the new scholars step in and say “No.” This 
was written by a number of men covering a period 
of several centuries. By and by the utterances of 
those various men, in manuscript form, came to be 
pinned together somehow, and took their title from 
the name of the longest chapter or from the writer 
who lived first, by the name of Isaiah. 

Furthermore, the parts have fallen together very 
carelessly; the portions by each author are not by 
themselves. The men who pieced them together must 
have been very ignorant, as anyone can see who studies 
the matter. There are parts of one page which be- 
long to parts on another page. You can determine 
it by the language, by the allusions, by a number of 
characteristics. If you read it as it stands in the old 
Version you jump from one subject to another, from 
<one standpoint to another, and the closer you read 
the more perplexed you are. 

But now look at my translation. On the same 
pages there may be two or three colors. Here are blue 
and red and purple, three unlike tints, for example. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


49 


What does all this mean? It is made on a scheme 
of colors, as you know. This is the “Polychrome 
Bible,” one of the most scholarly versions of our 
times. It is simply the translation of a scholar or a 
set of scholars; and where you have one color any- 
where in the book, it means that all the parts in that 
color belong together from one author, or from the 
same age, whereas the parts under another color belong 
to some other author or to another age. By this 
mtans, instead of reading the book straight through in 
a haphazard way, you can read it in the order in 
which the parts originally stood. Then you will see 
thfe real sublimity of the teachings of “Isaiah,” or 
the various “Isaiahs.” If you respected these teach- 
ings in former times, I almost venture to say that 
you will revere them now. They will make sense to 
you as perhaps never before. Y(ou are coming near 
to the original Bible. 


50 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


THE BIBLE AND HISTORY 


I wish to talk to you to-day about the Bible and 
history, and to answer the question as far as one can 
whetner the Bible teaches history. It is a solemn ques- 
tion with more significance in it than one might at 
first realize. According to the way we answer it, may 
depend our estimate of the value of the Bible. And 
the future estimate of the value of the sacred Scrips 
tures means a great deal, when we pause and reflect on 
the rank which this literature has held in Christendom. 

The year 586 B. C. stands as one of the great dates 
of history. Indeed, I am almost inclined to look upon 
it as ranking next in importance to that of the Chris- 
tian era. Around that former date the history of the 
Bible centers. Without appreciating what took place 
at that time, we cannot understand the Bible, nor 
should we He able to understand how it came into ex- 
istence. 

The rise of what we call the “Scriptures” is con- 
nected with the fall of Jerusalem. We mean by this 
the first ev“nt of that nature, and not the one which 
occurred under the attack of the Romans in the first 
century of the Christian era. 

The second fall of Jerusalem was an event which 
concerned the Hebrew people only. The course of 
history would not have been much changed, I venture 
to say, if Jerusalem had not fallen under the Romans. 
But with the first event of that kind six centuries be- 
fore, the entire world is concerned. Our history to- 
day, our American institutions, the thoughts of to- 
day, nineteenth century science and philosophy, can 
be traced back by stages to that first fall of Jerusalem. 
It was a sad and appalling event. The king, Zede- 
kiah, had his eyes put out and his children were 
murdered in his presence. The temple of Solomon 
was razed to the ground, the beautiful buildings set 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


51 


on fire and destroyed, and nearly all the people of 
the city were carried off as exiles to Babylon. 

We are sometimes inclined to trace the origin of the 
Bible to the epoch of Moses seven or eight centuries 
before that fall of Jerusalem. But that is a mistake. 
It was the “exile,” so-called, which, humanly speak- 
ing, led up to the Bible. The event which one would 
expect was surely to destroy all possibility of estab- 
lishing a sacred literature by wiping out the seat or 
center where it was to develop, was the event which, 
on the other hand, was to give us that literature. 

For over a hundred years a large proportion of the 
Hebrews remained in exile in the far-away Babylon- 
ian country. At the end of the first half-century a 
change had come and a number of them then were 
allowed to return to their native soil and to under- 
take to rebuild their city. But the true return did not 
occur until about 125 years after the first exile, when 
the great leaders of the people came back and set up 
a new Jerusalem. In doing this they set up a church. 
Never before had there been distinctively a church in 
Israel. 

How did the exile do this, you ask? Why, it was 
owing to just that process of natural selection which 
the school of evolution has taught us to apply, not 
only to events in the physical world, but likewise to 
events in the human and spiritual world. During that 
exile, those people of the Hebrew race who were not 
tenacious of their religious beliefs, who had not a 
strong individuality that could resist the influences 
surrounding them, tending to make them blend with 
the populations of Babylon — all such naturally fell 
away and fused with the soil to which they had been 
translated. The stock that was left, therefore, was 
of the sturdiest kind, stern and unbending, with a ca- 
pacity for resistance to surroundings, which has made 
that race survive to the present day. 

The date for the Bible as such, that is to say, for 
the recognition or establishment of a “Sacred Liter- 
ature,” was the year 444 B. C. Much of that litera- 
ture had come into existence before. But up to that 


52 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


time it was only literature. It had consisted of books 
and documents in many people’s hands, regarded with 
various dgrees of respect or reverence. After the 
restoration of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the 
temple, a certain number of those books or certain 
portions of that literature began to be regarded as a 
Bible, or to stand out as the Sacred Books. 

As you are aware, the great battle among the 
scholars of the last 50 or 100 years in regard to the 
Scriptures has been, as to what portions were pre- 
exilic, having arisen before the exile, and what por- 
tions were post-exilic, arising after the exile. 

The Old Testament falls practically into two por- 
tions, the one made up largely of historic material, be- 
ing the books giving us the records of the history of 
Israel, of their laws, and of their church ; the other be- 
ing sermons, books of teaching, or hymns, and con- 
taining more especially the thought-portion of the Old 
Testament — most of which goes under the name of the 
“Prophets.” 

But the work of the scholars has been first and 
supremely with reference to the historic books of the 
Old Testament. Does the Bible teach history? That 
has been the problem. There were the inconsistencies, 
the confusion of dates, the accounts of the same event 
which would not agree. All this offered fine ground 
for men who like discussion, and it has been an arena 
memorable in the annals of history. 

The Bible does teach history. That is settled. It 
teaches history in a marvelous and most valuable way. 
It is a perfect gold mine of information about the 
early world. If you want to read history I can only 
quote the old saying, “Search the Scriptures.” 

But remember that in reading history as in read- 
ing anything else, one must have intelligence and 
use it. 

The first point we have to bear in mind is that in 
the early world, books of history were not written 
with the same purpose or according to the same plan 
as books of history at the present time. It was the 
exception when they were written strictly for the pur- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


53 


pose of recording facts. As a rule, they were put 
into writing for educational or instructive purposes. 
In the days previous to writing, there were undoubt- 
edly grandmother-tales handed down from genera- 
tion to generation just as mere stories. But with the 
introduction of writing the world grew more serious 
and the mere story began to lose some of its im- 
portance. When men began to write they felt the 
necessity upon them of preparing the story accord- 
ing to certain lines. 

Suppose I give you a short illustration as to the way 
these Scriptures teach history. I open to the first book 
of the Scriptures called Genesis and turn to a well- 
known story which many of you are intimately ac- 
quainted with. I will read it to you as it stands : 

And it came to pass after these things, that God did prove 
Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham ; and he said, Here am 
I. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou 
lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah ; and 
offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains 
which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose early in the 
morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men 
with him, and Isaac, his son; and he clave the wood for the 
burnt offering, and rose up and went unto the place of which 
God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his 
eyes, and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said unto his 
young men, Abide ye here with the ass, and I and the lad will 
go yonder ; and we will worship and come again to you. And 
Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon 
Isaac, his son ; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife ; 
and they went both of them together. And Isaac spoke unto 
Abraham, his father, and said, My father; and he said, Here 
am I, my son. And he said, Behold, the fire and the wood; 
but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham 
said, God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, 
my son ; so they went both of them together. And they came 
to the place which God had told him of ; and Abraham built 
the altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac, 
his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. And 
Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay 
his son. And the angel of the Lord called unto him, out of 
heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham; and he said, Here am I. 
And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou 
anything unto him; for now I know that thou fearest God, 
seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from 
me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, 


54 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns; and 
Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a 
burnt offering in the stead of his son. And Abraham called 
the name of that place Jehovah-jireh ; and it is said to this 
day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be provided. And the 
angel of the Lord called unto Abraham a second time out of 
heaven, and said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, be- 
cause thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy 
son, thine only son; that in blessing, I will bless thee, and in 
multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, 
and as the sand which is upon the seashore ; and thy seed shall 
possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all na- 
tions of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my 
voice. 

Now, you will ask me, Was there a particular man 
who lived at a particular epoch by the name of Abra- 
ham? I answer, I do not know. You ask again, Did 
such a man have a son by the name of Isaac, and was 
he particularly instructed by his God to offer that 
son Isaac on the altar? I answer, I do not know. 
You ask me, Did that particular man take his par- 
ticular son Isaac and go to a particular place called 
Moriah? I answer, I do not know. You ask me 
again, Did that particular man Abraham with his par- 
ticular son Isaac build a particular altar at the particu- 
lar land of Moriah, and, having raised the knife to slay 
his child, did a particular ram appear in a particular 
thicket and was that particular ram chosen in the 
place of his particular son Isaac? I answer, I do not 
know. 

In what way, then, is this actual history? Why, I 
answer, this is a record of an event which took place 
in the history not merely of Israel, but in the history 
of the human race. You will find annals of this same 
kind in other literatures in other parts of the world. 
In a word, it indicates that at one time in the history 
of the Semitic race it had been the custom to offer 
human beings or human blood as sacrifices to the 
gods, more especially the first-born child, as the high- 
est gift one could make to one’s deity. But there 
came a time when the human consciousness began to 
grow more refined. The moral and religious sense 
grew more sensitive. And at last this higher con- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


55 


sciousness asserted that one’s God could not possibly 
be pleased with such a brutal gift. Hence there came 
in gradually a substitute for the old form of human 
sacrifice, by which animals were offered instead. The 
blood of the animal took the place of human blood, as 
a sacrifice to one’s God. And this story marks the 
change in the record of the Semitic race. 

The standpoint which I propose to unfold to you 
with regard to the historic books of the Bible goes 
under the name of the Development Theory. In a 
word, it points out to us that portions of many of the 
books of the sacred Scriptures lie there like strata, 
representing the stages of growth in the moral or re- 
ligious consciousness of mankind, more especially of 
the early Hebrew race. A certain passage represents 
a certain stage of culture. The record indicates how 
far along the religious consciousness of man had ad- 
vanced. 

It means in substance that the Bible is a sublime 
record of how man by degrees came to know his God, 
the ethical God, the God of righteousness. Written 
there in the Scriptures, in plain sight to all observers, 
is the record of the development of the moral or re- 
ligious consciousness of the human creature. The 
stages are all there. 

We do not say that it is an easy matter to open the 
Scriptures and read this and see it all there as it 
stands. If you pick up a fragment of rock by the road- 
side you may not be able readily to interpret the sig- 
nificance of that piece of stone in your hands and to 
tell what it means in the earth’s history, how it came 
there. But the trained eye or trained mind can do it. 
It takes education of a certain kind to use the mind 
at all. 

This standpoint I am speaking of, goes back for the 
most part for its origin to the scholars of Germany. 
It may be a hundred, or two hundred, or three hun- 
dred years, according as you choose to follow it up. 
As an important theory, it is only about half a cen- 
tury old and of much less age in the English-speaking 
world. It came out boldly in Great Britain for the 


56 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


first time in an article by a Scotch Presbyterian cler- 
gyman on “The Bible” in the last edition of the En- 
cyclopedia Britannica. His name, as you remember, 
was W. Robertson Smith. This article he followed 
by some lectures on “The Old Testament in the Jewish 
Church.” 

The excitement over that article and these lectures 
was tremendous and an effort was made to force him 
out of his position, and he was tried for heresy. But 
the outcome was practically a victory for him, al- 
though it deprived him of his professional position at 
Aberdeen. Yet it appears to have been settled by the 
Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland that a man was 
entitled to hold that attitude without necessarily be- 
ing in contradiction to the doctrines of his church. 

A few years after, I think it was in 1889, a volume 
of sermons appeared by a number of the clergy of the 
Church of England, entitled “Lux Mundi.” These 
sermons made a sensation. The editor of them, Rev. 
Charles Gore, took this same general attitude. In his 
own bold language he said: “It is the essence of the 
Old Testament to be imperfect, because it represents 
a gradual process of education by which man was lifted 
out of the depths of sin and ignorance.” 

About the time when the article on the Bible ap- 
peared in the Encyclopedia Britannica, the standpoint 
was introduced into this country by the well-known 
Prof. Brigggs of the Union Theological Seminary of 
New York City. He aroused a storm of excitement, 
you remember, and was tried before his church. 
Wearying of the long struggle, he finally, as you 
know, went over and joined the American Episcopal 
Church. This “development” standpoint has tri- 
umphed nearly everywhere in Germany, quite ex- 
tensively among the best scholars in England and 
Scotland, and is winning its way in this country also. 
In America, for instance, it is represented by such men 
as Prof. Moore of the Andover Theological Seminary, 
Prof. Ladd of the Yale University, Prof. Schmidt, 
who has the chair of Hebrew at Cornell, Prof. Briggs 
of the Union Theological Seminary at New York and 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


57 


Prof. Toy of Harvard University. It has made its 
way in England and the English church through 
Cheyne, Driver and Gore of Oxford. And its fore- 
most representatives in Germany are such men as 
Cornhill of Koenigsberg, Wellhausen of Goettingen 
and a host of others. 

Do not understand me as asserting that these men 
agree in all the details which I shall put forward to 
you. But they are all practically united on the method. 
One and all of them will tell you that they accept this 
Development Theory and explain the Scriptures by 
the process of growth, pointing out how the stages of 
moral or religious culture can be traced in the stages 
of development of the Sacred Scriptures. 

Now, I have told you emphatically that these books 
of the Old Testament do teach history, but I have 
pointed out to you plainly that when you read a pas- 
sage at random from one of those books you cannot 
take it in all its details as you would a passage of his- 
tory concerning the last century in England, which 
had been written in our own time. 

The vital problem to be settled was just this: When 
was the Jewish Church established? On the face of 
the records, reading them as a casual, untrained ob- 
server would read the history of the piece of rock he 
picked up at the roadside, this Jewish Church to which 
the new ideas about God, the religion of Christianity 
and even our latest civilization, can be traced back — 
this church was developed and established to its full- 
est extent, in its doctrines, its rites and ceremonies, 
its moral and religious laws, by the founder of the Jew- 
ish State, Moses; and it was all done, on the face of 
these records in the “Wilderness,” before the Jewish 
people had settled in Palestine and had founded their 
city of Jerusalem. 

The substance of all the discovery of the new schol- 
arship centers in the conviction that the entire account 
has to be reversed. In a word, the placing of that 
Jewish Church with its laws and ceremonies, its pre- 
cepts and doctrines, in the days of Moses, would be 
about like assuming that the fossil sea shells on the 


58 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


mountain top grew there up in the air and not at the 
bottom of the sea. 

It has come to be pretty generally recognized by 
these scholars, although with great differences on 
points of detail, that the Jewish Church, with all that 
elaborate ceremonialism, its temple and its priest- 
hood, dates about 800 years after Moses, and is con- 
nected with that first fall of Jerusalem, the exile of the 
Jews, their return, and the restoration of Jerusalem. 
It was during that exile, while the Jews were over 
in Babylon, that this great scheme was completely 
formulated, and it was after their return that the 
scheme was set up and a Jewish Church fully estab- 
lished. 

In doing this it seemed wise and honest to the lead- 
ers in those days to throw back the origin for all this 
to the founder of the Jewish State, Moses. A method 
of that kind was not looked upon in those days as de- 
ception. Everywhere in early literature you find the 
same custom. Where there has been a great leader, 
the habit has grown up afterward of writing books 
and attributing the authorship to that early leader, or 
throwing back the order of existing institutions to his 
time and his influence. 

The evidence for this has grown greater and greater 
by the study of the scholars in the structure of those 
historic books. The battle-royal centered around 
what was known as the Pentateuch, or the Five Books 
of Moses. Tradition states that Moses was their au- 
thor, and this had been asserted so long that it was 
thought to say so in the books themselves. But it 
did not. It only attributes certain limited portions to 
Moses. 

The accepted standpoint for explaining the origin 
of the historic books of the Bible is most satisfac- 
torily conveyed in what goes under the name of the 
Document Theory. In a word, it has been disclosed 
that the early books of the Bible grew up not so much 
by alterations, but by additions or a system of com- 
pilations ; first, by putting together miscellaneous 
documents, working them into one story, omitting 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


59 


certain portions, perhaps, but not necessarily chang- 
ing the text, and then afterward gradually adding on 
further portions as time went on. 

Let me give you an illustration, for instance, as to 
the way the Ten Commandments probably grew up. 
Suppose I read you one of these Comandments, the 
Fourth : 

“Observe the Sabbath Day to keep it holy, as the Lord thy 
God commanded thee. Six days shalt thou labor and do all 
thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath unto the Lord 
thy God ; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son 
nor thy daughter nor thy man-servant nor thy maid-servant 
nor thine ox nor thine ass nor any of thy cattle nor the 
stranger which is within thy gates ; that thy man-servant and 
thy maid-servant may rest as well as thou. And thou shalt 
remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt and 
the Lord thy God brought thee out hence by a mighty hand 
and by a stretched-out arm ; therefore the Lord thy God com- 
manded thee to keep the Sabbath Day.” 

Do you observe, however, that this is not the 
Fourth Commandment, as we have it recorded in the 
book of Exodus, in the account of “Mount Sinai and 
the Ten Commandments ?” In a word, it is the last 
edition of the Fourth Commandment. That is the 
whole point of it. 

It is coming to be accepted among good and ortho- 
dox thinkers that the original Ten Commandments 
were not in this form at all; that they were made up 
of ten short sentences running about as follows : 

Thou shalt have none other gods before me ; the first. 

Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image ; the second. 

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; 
the third. 

Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy; the fourth. 

Honor thy father and thy mother ; the fifth. 

Thou shalt do no murder; the sixth. 

Neither shalt thou commit adultery; the seventh. 

Neither shalt thou steal; the eighth. 

Neither shalt thou bear false witness; the ninth. 

Thou shalt not covet; the tenth. 

If the accepted Ten Commandments came at all 
from Moses they came from him in about this 
form, although the one about “images” is probably of 


60 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


later origin. More than one of these scholars assure 
us that even the Ten Commandments were never 
heard of by Moses, but were composed four or five 
hundred years after his death. At any rate, the first 
appearance of them in writing comes from about the 
year 800 B. C.. If they were first given by Moses they 
must have been sadly ignored or lost sight of for many 
generations afterward. In the days when the Israel- 
ites were conquering the Canaanites, to all appearance 
they had no reluctance to make “graven images” and 
to “worship” them. Not until 500 or 600 or more 
years after the death of Moses did the great fight come 
against idolatry, and it came not through the law- 
givers, but through the Prophets. 

An enlargement of the Decalogue came, however, 
by and by, in the form in which we now make use of 
it, and which is found in the book of Exodus, where 
we have described to us how it was delivered to Moses 
from Mount Sinai. The Fourth Commandment is no 
longer only “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it 
holy,” but has been expanded into a commandment 
many times the original sentence in length. And in the 
form in which I read it to you it is even longer and 
more elaborate than this. The language in which I 
have quoted it comes from Deuteronomy. 

It is easy enough to understand all of this. The orig- 
inal ten words may have been written down somewhere 
about the ninth century, then expanded in the eighth 
century and finally taken this form in the seventh cen- 
tury, because we know the exact time when the book 
of Deuteronomy was published almost as closely as 
we do the time when the Declaration of Independence 
was issued. It was in the year 621 B. C. Then the 
latest form of the Ten Commandments was given to 
the world. Of all the first six books of the Bible it 
is the fifth, or Deuteronomy, which is most distinc- 
tively one document. 

But if you will look more carefully at the place 
where the Ten Commandments are recorded in Exodus 
in connection with Mount Sinai, you will observe that 
they form part of a series of chapters which go under 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


61 


the name of the “Book of the Covenant.” And it is 
pretty generally agreed by these scholars that in those 
chapters are a number of Ten Commandments or 
series of Decalogues, and not just one. Suppose I 
read you another Decalogue contained in this same 
book of Exodus purporting to have been written on 
two tables of stone and given to Moses. And you will 
note its peculiarities, as one of our foremost scholars 
has pointed them out, who gives it in the following 
form: 

Thou shalt not worship another god; first. 

Molten gods thou shalt not make; second. 

Six days shalt thou labor, but on the seventh day thou shalt 
rest; third. 

The feast of unleaven bread thou shalt observe; fourth. 

The feast of weeks thou shalt keep at the first fruits of the 
wheat harvest; fifth. 

The feast of the ingathering thou shalt observe at the cir- 
cuit of the year ; sixth. 

Thou shalt not offer the blood of my zebach with leaven 
bread; seventh. 

The zebach of the feast of the Passover shall not be left 
unto the morning; eighth. 

The first of the first-fruits of thy ground thou shalt bring 
to the house of Yahweh, thy God; ninth. 

Thou shalt not seethe the kid with its mother’s milk ; tenth. 

It would rather surprise us if we should learn that 
this was the original Decalogue written on two tables 
of stone for Moses. But the account almost seems to 
indicate that this zms the Decalogue given by Moses 
and in that fashion. 

And which of the two Decalogues came first, do you 
suppose? The second one, you may suggest. One 
might assume this. It certainly appears to us as the 
cruder form. But there is some reason to think that 
it came afterward ; that the older and simpler law was 
about the earliest to have been written, and that the 
ceremonialism of this other Decalogue belongs to a 
later time. 

Now, as to this Document Theory. Any of you 
who have read the early books of the Bible will see 
that oftentimes you have two accounts of the same 
story. This is apparent enough, for instance, at the 


62 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


beginning of Genesis, where you have two descrip- 
tions of the Creation, one contained in the first chap- 
ter with the account of the “six days/’ and then a short 
one near the opening of the second chapter. If you 
read carefully you will see that there are two accounts 
of the Deluge. This dualism in places is most clear, 
and then again quite obscure. 

When this was first observed it naturally led to a 
careful study of these separate accounts which are 
found more or less pieced in together side by side in 
the early books of the Bible. They began to notice 
striking features in the style of language used in cer- 
tain of the accounts, and other striking features in the 
style of language of other parallel accounts. It was 
found, for instance, that in one part the name of the 
Deity was in one form, and in another part the name 
of the Deity was in another form. 

It was apparent enough that they had before them 
two documents, and that these documents had 
simply been run together by the reviser, who had not 
changed them especially, but pieced them together 
somehow, so as to make one intelligible record. 
These documents are now named, as you know, 
according to the name of the Deity more often 
used by the original author. And so, for instance, the 
document which contained the “Garden of Eden” 
story is called the Yah wist document, because the 
author’s preference for the name of the Deity is 
“Yahweh.” The other document is called oftentimes 
the Elohist, because the author there more often 
speaks of the Deity as “Elohim.” The scholar takes 
these two documents apart with marvelous ease, after 
he has once found his cue, and then he sees how a 
reviser wove them together. 

Not only that ; he observes how the reviser, in order 
to make the account more intelligible or for other rea- 
sons, has added on portions or inserted clauses or 
whole paragraphs, according to circumstances. This 
peculiar “document” scheme runs practically all the 
way through the Hexateuch from the book of Genesis 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


63 


to the book of Joshua, which describes the first con- 
quest of Canaan by the Israelites. 

The supposition is that the “Yahwist” account 
arose perhaps about 850 B. C., in the southern king- 
dom, followed about a century later by the “Elohist” 
account, which arose in the northern kingdom. At 
that time they were mere documents and had no pe- 
culiar sacredness. They were not the “Holy Scrip- 
tures.” The great prophets who were beginning to 
appear at that time do not talk of sacred writings then 
in existence, or speak of “inspired” Books of the Law. 
On the contrary, they talk straight to the people, as 
if speaking themselves for the Most High. 

The first great event in the beginnings of the Jew- 
ish Church came in the year 621 at Jerusalem, about 
thirty years before the destruction of the city and the 
exile. At that time a good and earnest king was rul- 
ing over Jerusalem, and one day in the temple an im- 
portant discovery was reported to have been made 
there. It was said that in effecting some changes or 
alterations in the building an old copy of sacred law 
from Moses had been found. This is now recognized 
as containing the major portion of what we speak of 
as the book of “Deuteronomy.” * The scholars are all 
practically agreed on this point. And that document 
laid the foundations for the Hebrew Church. It is ren- 
dered wholly as if spoken by Moses toward the end 
of his life, although written beyond question 600 years 
after the death of Moses. And the keynote at last was 
struck which was to lead to the establishment of the 
Church of Israel. 

The problem was, whether the Hebrews at that time 
would fuse with the Canaanites ; whether their religion 
would run together with the religion of the Canaanites ; 
whether the races would blend and no distinctive re- 
ligion come out at the end of the long struggle. 


*It should be stated, however, that the stories and records 
in the various documents including the legal provisions do 
not necessarily date from the time when the documents were 
completed. In fact, much of what is contained in these docu- 
ments represents old traditions and long existing practices. 


64 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


But when this Book of the Law was found and 
opened, there stood the charge before the eyes of the 
people and before the eyes of the king : Separate your- 
selves, for you are a peculiar people; have done with 
the gods of the Canaanites; destroy their idols; put 
an end to your many altars; set up your one altar at 
Jerusalem. 

In this book was contained the Ten Command- 
ments. This was the first solemn proclamation of the 
Decalogue. Then for the first time in the history of 
the Hebrew people did that Decalogue take rank as a 
sacred document. 

It had existed before in various other books, as, for 
instance, in the Yahwist account, written in the south 
of Palestine. But those were only documents. This 
was received as a book of holy law ; and, what is more, 
the king of that time accepted it and put on sack-cloth 
for the sins he had been guilty of in neglecting that 
law, and set about to reconstruct the city in accord- 
ance with it. By this means there came to be the dis- 
tinction between the Church and the State. It set 
up a priesthood and a temple, and established one cen- 
ter of religious worship for all the people. 

And what happened ? Some of you know the story. 
Thirty or forty years afterward came the king of 
Babylon, and Jerusalem was razed to the ground. The 
temple was no more. There was an end of the priest- 
hood at Jerusalem. 

And what about that Book of Law contained in the 
so-called fifth book of Moses, known as Deuteronomy, 
the first book of the law put forward as Sacred Scrip- 
ture? 

If that destruction of Jerusalem had not come, hu- 
manly speaking, we know what would have taken 
place. For a little while that book of the law, with its 
commands against idolatry, with its insistence upon 
worshiping the one God, with its command that the 
people should separate themselves from the Canaan- 
ites, keep their Sabbath Day and worship in one cen- 
ter — all this would have been followed for a little time. 
Then a new king would have come along ; there would 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 65 

have been a reaction, and old customs would have 
come in, and that would have been the end of it. 

But when the Hebrews were carried away captive 
to Babylon, and their city was no more, they carried 
with them this book we call Deuteronomy, containing 
the Ten Commandments and all those precepts and 
commissions to which I have referred. It was the one 
thing they had left. The altars were gone, their 
temple was gone, their city was no more. But they 
had their one Book of Holy Law. 

And over there in Babylon, or in that neighborhood 
far, far away from their native home, in a strange land 
and among a strange people, a few of them held to- 
gether, lived together, talked together and clung to- 
that Book. And wise men grew up in their number, 
sages appeared, and they began to expound this 
“Law.” They had brought with them those other 
documents of former times, of which the historic ma- 
terial of the Pentateuch is largely made up, and in their 
isolation in that far away country the wise men were 
putting these documents together, writing in the ex- 
planations, making the necessary additions, expanding 
the law in their dream of the true Church of Israel. 

It was in the exile over there at Babylon that the 
Jewish Church took shape in the minds of the sages 
of Israel. Mind you, I do not say, the religion of 
Judaism. That is another matter. No, the religion 
came rather from the Prophets, some of whom had 
spoken long before the exile. Buf if the elements of 
that sublime ethical monotheism were to be handed 
down through the ages, it was essential for the time 
that a church, an organized church, should exist as a 
means of preserving it. Without such organization 
those teachings of the Prophets might have been lost 
or fallen out of sight. 

Out of the Hebrew Prophets and their teachings 
evolved the high religious thought of later ages, as I 
shall aim to show you in a future lecture. They were 
the first fathers of Christianity. 

You will see what I meant at the outset in speaking 
of that period of the “exile” for the Israelites, as be- 


66 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


ing an epoch-making time in the history of the world 
and not merely in the history of the Hebrew people. 
There had first to be a Jewish Church, if there ever 
was to come, by and by, a Christendom. And the 
exile, with the sad destruction of Jerusalem, was what 
acted as a sifting process leading to the establishment 
of that Church. 

The foundation of the great Hebrew Church, as it 
developed after the exile, is to be traced not to the 
Pentateuch as such — for the whole Pentateuch was not 
in existence before that time — but to that book of 
Deuteronomy, which was published in Jerusalem about 
thirty years before the fall of the city and its destruc- 
tion by the king of Biabylon. 

I wish I had time to read you this book. It is a 
strange blending of antiquated doctrines, with antici- 
pations of some of the finest moral precepts which 
have ever been given to the world. 

It comes, as you know, at the close of the Penta- 
teuch, and before it stands another body of law 
called “Leviticus,” purporting therefore to be the first 
rather than the second set of laws. But, as a matter 
of fact, a large portion of Leviticus, with all that elabo- 
rate ceremonialism which encumbered the Jewish 
church and against which Jesus raised his voice when 
he overthrew the tables of the “money changers” — all 
this, or a large portion of it, came in through the 
priests as laws drafted by them during the exile. 

All that elaborate code specifying the burnt offer- 
ings or sacrifices which had to be made under given 
circumstances, was more and more to reduce the re- 
ligion of Judaism to a bare ceremonialism ; so that this 
same Jewish church which acted at first as a preserver 
of religion, by and by became the very force which 
threatened to annihilate it. 

I explained something of this in what I told you of 
the book of “Jonah” in my last lecture, and how the 
author of that book was rising in protest against that 
ceremonialism and exclusiveness which threatened to 
make Judaism a dead force in future civilization. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


67 


The religion of Judaism is contained largely in the 
Books of the Prophets, rather than in the historic 
books or Books of the Law. But you can see in those 
revisions of the old historic books or Books of the 
Law, how the religious consciousness was evolving. 
With each advance of this kind there was new effort to 
bring the early literature up to the higher standpoint. 
Such elaborations of old documents could go on until 
a theory of a sacred “canon” was established. Then 
the “revisions” had to cease. 

But where, then, you ask, does Moses come in? 
Was there no Moses ; were the children of Israel never 
in Egypt; was there no Mount Sinai, no Joshua, no 
conquest of Canaan? Is that all a myth? Does all 
that go back to a tradition which has no truth in it ? 

Surely, I have not meant to make any such an as- 
sertion. Indeed, there is a vast amount of truth in it. 

Was there a Moses? Surely; who can doubt it? 
Did he strike the rock with his rod and did water 
gush forth for the thirsty people ? As to that I cannot 
positively say. That is one of those details which is 
a picture rather than an event. It is of no consequence 
whether he did or did not do that particular deed. 

Did Moses write down the Ten Commandments as 
we have them? Really I do not know. We shall 
never be able to settle that point. But I do not see 
that it matters at all in so far as the value of the Com- 
mandments go, or even so far as the value of these 
records go. That, too, was a detail or picture rather 
than an event — a dramatic sketch of the appearance of 
ethical precepts and of their recognition by the human 
consciousness. 

But there was a Moses, a mighty man and leader, 
a sage, one of those great figures who come once in 
a thousand years. And this man took the Israelites 
into the Peninsula of Sinai. He led them forth as a 
wild horde of undisciplined slaves, whose ancestors 
had been shepherds in Canaan. And by his genius, 
his insight and intelligence, he organized them, held 
them together as a people, and probably gave them a 
new name for their God. Holding before them the 


68 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


“Yahweh” as a new name for their Deity, he infused 
into them a certain spirit out of which, 400 years after, 
came the Ten Commandments, out of which, 600 years 
after, came the Prophets ; out of which, 800 years after, 
came the Jewish Church. Moses, in a sense, was the 
father of it all, and it was not without reason that the 
leaders of the later epoch went back and put their 
own words into the mouth of Moses. He started the 
spirit for the pentateuch, although he probably never 
wrote a word of it. 

Yes, the Israelites had been in Egypt, a body of 
them. They had come down from Canaan and settled 
in the land of Goshen. There were “Abraham, Isaac 
and Jacob,” although whether the three great patri- 
archs were so closely connected as to be grandfather, 
father and son, we shall never know. Perhaps they 
were all living at the same time and fused together as 
one tribe, as has been suggested by certain scholars. 
But the nucleus of the Hebrew race had been in Pales- 
tine. They settled in Egypt; they crossed the Red 
Sea under the leadership of Moses ; they lived there in 
that Peninsula as wanderers for a time. All this is 
history. And beyond any question they worshiped 
their God at Mount Sinai. 

It is history, too, that they crossed the Jordan — a 
part of them, but not all of them — and settled in Pales- 
tine again. The various stages there, immediately con- 
nected with that event, we cannot be sure of. In one 
book we find an account which describes them as go- 
ing there, all of them, and conquering the land, where- 
as, in another book called the Judges we find an ac- 
count of how they entered that new country small 
bodies of them at a time, gradually crossing the Jor- 
dan and only gradually settling in the land of Canaan. 

It is history, too, that they conquered that land in 
part. But it is not history that they were at first vastly 
superior, morally or socially, to the Canaanites. The 
moral superiority came later on. For a time they wor- 
shiped the gods of the Canaanites and forgot their 
Shepherd God, whom they had known and worshiped 
in the desert as “Yahweh.” It is history that they lived 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


69 


as scattered tribes in Palestine until by and by great 
leaders appeared, two men by the names of Saul and 
David, who at last made a kingdom out of them and 
established a government with its center at Jerusalem. 
David was no psalmist ; not a “sweet singer in Israel,” 
writing the hymn-book for the Jewish Church. He 
was a fighter, a slayer of men, a shedder of human 
blood. And he was the second founder of the Jewish 
State after Moses. 

From that time on we have real history. We know 
how the kingdom was divided into “Israel” on the 
north and “Judah” on the south, after the death of 
Solomon, and how these two kingdoms went on sep- 
arately until gradually a true religious spirit began to 
develop through the Prophets. It is history that the 
Kingdom of Israel in the north was first destroyed. 
In the year 722 the ten tribes of the north were wiped 
out of existence and became the “Lost Tribes of Is- 
rael.” And it is history, too, how the conflicts came 
on between Judah and Egypt on the one hand, or Ju- 
dah and Babylonia on the other, until by and by, in the 
sixth century, Jerusalem fell and the kingdom was no 
more. 


70 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


THE BIBLE AND PROPHECY 


I open my Bible again in the latter part of the Old 
Testament and come upon a series of books which are 
called “The Prophets,” as distinguished from the ear- 
lier books of the Bible which have to do with history, 
and the middle books of the Old Testament which are 
more “literary” in character. 

I ask your closest attention to what I shall have to 
say concerning these prophets, because in a certain 
respect, they constitute the richest portion of the Bible. 
They give us the kernel of the religion of Christendom 
of to-day — much of the religion which you and I 
believe in and approve of, either as conservatives or as 
rationalists. The starting point for it all is here. 

The books of the “Prophets” are in sharp contrast 
with the earlier books of which we have spoken, in 
that they are personal utterances of individuals. They 
record the spoken word of teachers, and although 
they too have gone through a series of revisions like 
the historical books, yet they have received their stamp 
of being first hand documents. They are full of in- 
sertions, frequently quite extensive but they do 
not represent a union of distinct documents. On the 
other hand, it is very apparent that few if any of these 
prophecies which bear some one name, came from one 
author. 

If, as a matter of fact, there may have been a num- 
ber of authors of one or more of these books, although 
all under the same title, this is because different utter- 
ances written down in that way, were put together in 
a rather careless manner, and so, after awhile, began 
to be looked upon, mistakenly, as one document. 

The Old Testament was composed for the most part 
between 800 B. C'. and 200 B. C., covering a period 
therefore of about 600 years. One or two of these 
prophets, for instance, belonged to an epoch not more 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


71 


than two centuries before the Christian era. Others 
wrote and spoke somewhere in the eighth century 
previous to that era. 

We must remind you that the order in which the 
“Prophets” stand in the Bible has no significance. In- 
deed, the order is confusing and makes them almost 
unintelligible, unless you are provided with informa- 
tion as to the dates and circumstances with which we 
now connect these various books. 

Not only that. But, as with the historic books, it is 
essential to re-arrange the contents of the individual 
prophecies. 

When the new scholarship began to grapple with 
this part of the Bible, the problem was not quite the 
same as with the historic books. It was not so much 
to ascertain the dates when these books were written, 
because there was greater unanimity of opinion on this 
score than with regard to the first books of the Bible. 
It had even been admitted by conservative and radical 
alike, for example, that there had been at least two 
authors for the book of Isaiah. 

The problem was rather as to the interpretation of 
their contents; and on this point there has been no 
end of confusion. The trouble started with a mis- 
take which had come down as to the meaning of 
“prophecy” or the purpose of the prophet’s “work. 
The term itself is most unfortunate. As we under- 
stand the word now, it implies foretelling the future. 
And for ages that is the first thought which has 
been connected with the books of Prophecy in the 
Bible. 

It is practicaly certain now that originally the word 
applying to the Prophets of the Bible had no such 
meaning at all. 

In point of fact, the “prophet” in the early signifi- 
cance of the name he went by, was not so much a man 
who could foretell the future. The term meant rather 
one who “raves.” 

In early history there was more of this than at the 
present time. The human mind has grown more nor- 
mal and sane as time has gone on. But if there was 


72 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


more “raving” in those days, still less was there a clear 
understanding of what it meant. 

Yet among uncivilized races to-day as in those days, 
there is a certain regard felt for the persons who are 
given to spiritual intoxication. There is something 
strange about them which suggests the supernatural. 
They may be the “medicine men” of our Indian tribes. 
They gave rise to the famous “oracles” of Greece, as 
for instance, in the Temple of Delphi. There is a vast 
deal of this at the present time in India, connected 
with the mysticism there. The prophet in the early 
sense of Hebrew literature meant, therefore, not one 
who foretells the future, but one who raves, one who 
went into a state of “ecstasy” or could pass over into 
a condition of semi-spiritual intoxication. 

It may have happened in those early days that this 
class of men were a valuable institution. They became 
leaders and were known as wise men, and oftentimes 
they were very sagacious in their utterances and were 
excellent guides in the opinions they offered. Hence, 
it was not a bad thing for the half-civilized man to 
consult the “oracle.” As a matter of fact, the man 
who voiced the oracles was a man of much experience. 
And what is more, as he grew in experience, he was 
evidently less given to raving or going off into a 
trance, and much more given to offering sagacious ad- 
vice from his large experience. This explains the 
value which was attributed to the oracles of Greece. 

In the earlier books of the Bible, you read of 
“schools of prophecy.” You might therefore assume 
that there were bodies of men who met and practiced 
the foretelling of the future. But it meant nothing 
of the kind. They were rather bodies of men given to 
raving or “ecstasy.” They were a class of persons who 
took a delight in passing off into trance-state, as it 
were, and who associated themselves in groups, living 
together perhaps like monks. They were sometimes 
ascetics, cultivating all the means possible in order 
that they might be carried over into that state of 
trance or ecstasy. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


73 


These were the first prophets of Israel. They were 
“trance men,” or men who raved and seemed to pass 
out of themselves and appeared to be inspired by su- 
pernatural influences. 

I do not say that the great prophets whose writings 
we have in the Bible, belonged to that class of persons. 
We are only tracing the genesis of the institution. It 
was out of that thing, as it were, that the great pro- 
phets evolved , after the condition of mind ceased to be 
one of abnormal trance and showed itself rather as a 
high state of intellectual or spiritual insight. But 
when those men talked, pouring forth their language 
of ethical passion, often they must have looked like 
the men who “raved.” In the minds of the people, they 
would be placed in the same class. It was felt as if 
those men spoke through a spiritual force not of them- 
selves. What is more, the men themselves who spoke, 
almost beyond question believed this. They, too, felt 
themselves inspired. 

I am telling you this because I want to explain to 
you what a difficult problem it was to go back and in- 
terpret the utterances of these prophets, owing to this 
mistaken apprehension as to what that prophecy origi- 
nally meant. As tradition had settled the point that 
prophecy meant foretelling the future, it was natural 
that the sayings of those great prophets in the early 
times should be explained by after-events. As a result 
of this, you find that the utterances of those prophets 
are applied to occurrences taking place a thousand or 
two thousand years after the men themselves lived. 

You will see this tendency strikingly manifest with 
regard to the one book of prophecy in the New Testa- 
ment now called “Revelations.” This book most 
surely had exclusive reference to events connected 
with the time of the Roman Empire. But you will 
learn of sane, intelligent people of the present time 
who are referring events which have happened within 
the last ten years, to that book of Revelation, and 
showing how these events were foretold there. The 
fate of the Turkish Efripire is a favorite topic of those 
who read that last book of the New Testament in this 


74 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


way; and they can see how the author of that book 
was foretelling what is to happen to Constantinople 
and the Sultan of Turkey. 

If this is true with regard to the book of prophecy 
in the New Testament, much more has it been so 
with the prophets of the Old Testament. Now if there 
is any point sure, beyond doubt to the rational mind, I 
should say it was that the men who wrote in those 
days were not thinking of 2,000 years from their time. 
They had no idea of such a distant future. They 
were speaking with regard to what was going to hap- 
pen in the course of a hundred years. They were 
uttering warnings or offering hopes to the generations 
then living, working on the fears or stirring the cour- 
age of the people of that time. It does not influence 
people much when you presume to foretell something 
which is going to happen in the world a thousand or 
two thousand years from now. It takes a very high 
order of mind to be stirred by that sort of expectation. 

For the most part, their utterances were not what 
we would call prophecies, were not intended as revela- 
tions concerning the future. They were ravings — 
using ravings in the higher sense. They were a ful- 
mination of the moral sense in its most sublime form. 
Ethical religion, in the strict interpretation of the word, 
begins with these prophets, and had little to do with the 
“foretelling” capacity. 

In after times, the custom grew up more and more 
of referring the history and growth of Christianity 
back to the language of these prophets, and interpret- 
ing that language by what was happening in after 
times. 

I might give you just one illustration of such mis- 
taken interpretation of prophecy if you will turn to 
the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. All over the Chris- 
tian world, even at the present time, as well as in 
past centuries, it has been customary to point out 
this chapter as a prophecy of Jesus and the way Jesus 
was to live and to die. It has been given a “Messianic’' 
significance. You know the words well, many of you. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


75 


“He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, 
and acquainted with grief ; and as one from whom men hide 
their face, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely 
he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows ; yet we did 
esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was 
wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniqui- 
ties; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with 
his stripes we are healed. All we, like sheep have gone 
astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the 
Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was op- 
pressed, yet he humbled himself and opened not his mouth ; as 
a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her 
shearers is dumb; yea, he opened not his mouth.” 

It is a beautiful picture you have there, and in a 
way it does portray the life and death of Jesus. 

But when you think of it carefully, you observe that 
it portrays the experience of hundreds or thousands 
of other sufferers and reformers. As a matter of fact, 
we know, almost for a certainty, that in this picture 
the prophet was not giving a messianic anticipation 
at all. 

No, the prophet is describing something near at 
hand. He is picturing the “remnant of the righteous” 
in Israel, those who were the true servants of the 
Deity and who were going through all of that sad ex- 
perience, suffering for the sins of Israel, but through 
whom the ideal Israel was to survive and reappear in 
actual fact when the new Jerusalem should come. To 
my mind this other interpretation gives far more 
grandeur to the passage. Yet, if you will look at the 
top of the page of your “teacher’s Bible” above the 
fifty-third chapter and see the head lines, you will 
read, “The Messiah’s Humiliations and Sufferings.” 

If these writings were to be interpreted in the nor- 
mal way, it was essential to get back into the atmos- 
phere of the prophets themselves, and to throw aside 
altogether the traditions of later times as to the func- 
tions of those prophets. You can get no rational idea 
of what the teaching of those prophets was, unless you 
abandon altogether that notion of those books as 
being chiefly a revelation concerning the future. In 
our mind’s eye we should drop the term “Prophet” 


76 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


altogether and substitute the word Teacher. They 
were Teachers in Israel and the Teachers of Israel. 

Some of the finest portions of the so-called prophecy 
in the Bible came in the two centuries just preceding 
the fall of Jerusalem in 586. But it was a new pro- 
phecy because so unlike what had come from the 
“Schools of the Prophets.” As for the utterances of 
that other class of men, in their general tenor, they 
were often not unlike what one would get to-day if one 
went to the played-out vestige of that “School,” the 
mediums or fortune-tellers of the present time. In a 
word, they would tell just about what one wanted to 
hear, and one would be expected to pay well for it. 
The fortune-teller usually “knows his man.” 

But the note of the new prophecy as it rang out in 
those centuries was of another kind. It was not 
soothing to the ears ; it did not whisper peace to the 
heart or good cheer to the mind. It was not the kind 
that people would care to pay liberally for. Its key- 
note was of just the character that most persons dis- 
like to listen to. It was Woe, Woe, Woe — one long 
wailing note of Woe. Drearisome, monotonous, ex- 
asperating, it kept sounding in the ears of the people 
from these new “ravers” who had another message to 
give and asked no pay for their utterances. The peo- 
ple cried, “Let us alone.” But the new prophets 
would not let them alone. Once and again they cried 
out in their tones of woe. 

I might give you one sample of this prophecy of the 
Old Testament. On first reading, the whole of 
“Prophecy” in the Bible will strike you as very much 
alike, or of the same general character, monotonous in 
the extreme, repeating a few sentiments over and over 
again. The selection I have in mind has been re- 
garded as the basis of the well known Day-of-Judg- 
ment hymn, the “Dies Irae.” I take it from one of 
the “minor” prophets, Zephaniah. 

“The great day of the Lord is near, it is near, and hasteth 
greatly, even the voice of the day of the Lord; the mighty 
man crieth there bitterly. That day is a day of wrath, a day 
of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


77 


day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick 
darkness, a day of the trumpet and alarm, against the fenced 
cities, and against the high battlements. And I will bring dis- 
tress upon men, that hey shall walk like blind men, because 
they have sinned against the Lord; and their blood shall be 
poured out as dust and their flesh as dung. Neither their sil- 
ver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of 
the Lord’s wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by 
the fire of his jealousy; for he shall make an end, yea, a terri- 
ble end, of all them that dwell in the land. Gather yourselves 
together, yea, gather together, O nation that hath no shame; 
before the decree bring forth, before the day pass as the chaff, 
before the fierce anger of the Lord come upon you, before the 
day of the Lord’s anger come upon you.” 

And this was the kind of language which was being 
sounded for upward of 200 years in Palestine by those 
great teachers. No wonder the people had no use 
for them, and shrank away from them. Yet they had 
to listen to it. Even the kings could not escape those 
voices. On it went sounding, that same dreary and 
fearful cry of warning and menace, the thunder tones 
of denunciation spoken by the prophets of Israel. 

And why did all this come? What led to it? In 
what relation did these men stand to the Priesthood? 
The Jewish Church in its developed form had not 
yet been established. But the elements for it were 
all there. Centuries before that time among the Israel- 
ites there had been priests just the same, with altars 
and sacrificial offerings ; there were feast days and fast 
days; there were laws and precepts of various kinds 
taught to the people. This had all existed even among 
the Canaanites before the Israelites came into the 
country. Ceremonial observances of various kinds are 
to be traced back to the very beginnings of history. 
The altars were all over Palestine. Blood offerings 
without number were being made to Yahweh or the 
other gods ; human sacrifice still prevailed to some ex- 
tent. King David himself is reported to have slaugh- 
tered his enemies before the altar of Yahweh, as a 
blood offering to his God. 

In those early days, from the time of David down to 
the destruction of Jerusalem, it would not have been 
such an easy matter to have distinguished between the 


78 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


worship of Israel’s God, Yahweh, and the worship of 
the gods of the Canaanites. The lines were not drawn 
very sharply. There was not one center of worship 
at Jerusalem ; no one exclusive altar, no one especially 
separated priesthood, and no recognized code of Sacred 
Scripture. A ceremonial worship, ritual service to 
the gods or God, was going on in any number of ways 
all over the land. It has come down as I have said, 
from prehistoric times. 

The Jewish Church of later times after the exile, in 
its festivals and fasts, in its rites or ritual, was made 
up largely of what had existed in former times, only 
now woven into a system and centering around the 
worship of one God. The Sabbath Day, for instance, 
which we attribute exclusively — and in a sense, rightly 
so — to Judaism, had existed as a lunar festival among 
the Babylonians and may have been adopted by the Ca- 
naanites before the children of Israel came into that 
country at all.* It was not the invention of the He- 
brews, that of setting apart one day in seven as a fes- 
tival day. In fact, they may have borrowed the no- 
tion altogether from the Babylonians or from the Ca- 
naanites. 

What they did do was to transform the notion of 
the festival, dealing with it not as a mere feast day, 
but giving to it the phase of its being a Day of Rest. 
From the earliest times downward, there has always 
been the antithesis between the priest and the prophet. 
It has been the function of the priests to look after 
the worship of the Deity as a ritual or ceremonial. He 
has attended to what we should call the church services 
or prayers or “religious rites” as we now term them. 
What is more, he has been the conservator of tradi- 
tion. He stands normally for the authority of the 
past. His function has been to uphold the established 
law ; and in this function the priesthoods of the world 
have served a mighty purpose for good in the progress 
of civilization. 


*The problem of the Sabbath is a particularly difficult and 
complicated one. 


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79 


But as any one can see, it is inevitably a one-sided 
function, in that it tends to stop the wheels of progress 
by forcing mankind to live exclusively on the authority 
of the past. If it had the exclusive control, it would 
hold to what was established and society would come 
to a standstill. 

Every now and then therefore, in bygone ages, 
there has arisen another class of religious teachers 
who have taken the opposite standpoint and repre- 
sented another function in the history of religion — 
equally important though not necessarily more so than 
that of the priesthood. Because of the antithesis I 
speak of, it will not do for us necessarily to look down 
on the one class while we exalt the other. They have 
both been essential to the advance of the human race. 

The contrast between the priesthood and the pro- 
phets of Israel lies right at one point. It was the 
characteristic of the priesthood of the Jewish Church 
as it became more and more an established institution, 
when they had anything to proclaim, for them to cry 
out, “Thus said Moses.’’ 

But the prophet, as you know, took precisely the 
other attitude. It was his cry : “Thus saith the Lord.” 
He spoke from the present standpoint ; the priest, from 
the past. He talked as if speaking for God, addressing 
the people straight from his inner consciousness. 

During the interval after the entrance of the Israel- 
ites into Palestine down nearly to the time of the fall 
of Jerusalem, religion had largely been ritualistic in 
character, worship of the gods with offerings, feasts, 
sacrifices. More and more its charge had fallen into 
the hands of the priestly class who presided over that 
ceremonialism, and who undoubtedly more and more 
were trying to get complete control of all religious ob- 
servances. 

In the midst of that old worship of the gods by sac- 
rifices, blood offerings and festivals, in the midst of the 
idolatry which paid respect to all the gods, although 
perhaps a little more respect to Yahweh as. the God 
of the Israelites, fell for the first time the voice of the 


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prophet, the man who stood forth and cried, “Thus 
saith the Lord.” 

The kernel of our ethical religious thought of to- 
day in this century and in the civilized world, comes 
into evidence for the first time at this point. 

What caused it, you ask? I wish you would answer 
the question. As for me, I cannot do it. The thoughts 
which make the turning points in history just come; 
that is all the answer you can give. After they come 
it is possible to account for the way they spread and 
grow ; but their first coming is beyond human ken. 

At that age, the eighth century before the Christian 
era, something happened. There was a turn in events 
of the world. It was not a curve, but seemingly a 
right angle. 

I am thinking, of course, of the appearance of pro- 
phecy in Israel. If you ask what were the surround- 
ing circumstances which acted as a nourishment for it, 
that I can answer. 

There was turmoil or commotion in the spiritual at- 
mosphere of Palestine at that time. A thunder cloud 
was seen in the distance. And its mutterings ap- 
proached the corners of all Israel. A mighty empire 
in the far east, known as Assyria and centering around 
the city of Nineveh, had been marching its armies 
across one country after another, and the storm was 
approaching with its fury the neighborhood of Pales- 
tine. 

In the presence of that storm cloud a new kind of 
Prophet stood forth — an Ethical Judge. 

But to what did this prophecy apply itself? It may 
surprise you if you have not studied the subject. You 
may think it is going to start from jealousy on behalf 
of God- worship, the right belief in Yahweh, the God 
of Israel. But no ; its first note of warning seems not 
to have centered there. 

It was the oppression of the poor — the tyranny over 
the weak by the strong. This was the thought it put 
forth. 


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81 


The first prophet was a herdsman or shepherd. And 
this is what the herdsman began to say to the people : 

“The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise; she 
is cast down upon her land ; there is none to raise her up. 
Forasmuch as ye trample upon the poor and take exactions 
from him of wheat; ye have built houses of hewn stone, but 
ye shall not dwell in them ; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, 
but ye shall not drink the wine thereof. Woe unto you that 
desire the day of the Lord ! Wherefore would ye have the 
day of the Lord? It is darkness and not light — even very 
dark, and no brightness in it.” 

What would they make of all that. There they were 
at the altars worshiping Yahweh, the God of Israel, 
making sacrifices, keeping the very festivals which 
were in honor of their God, doing as the priests had 
told them to do. 

But one prophet, whose name was Amos, goes on 
with his “Thus saith the Lord”: 

“Neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat 
beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; 
for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.” 

“Seek good and not evil, that ye may live. Hate the evil 
and love the good and establish judgment in the gate; let 
judgment roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty 
stream.” 

This tells the story. The revolution had come with 
that new proclamation that the true worship of God 
was by one's ethical conduct and not by “rites and ob- 
servances.” The note was sounded twenty-five hun- 
dred years ago. It is the kernel of all there is in all 
the prophets of the Old Testament. 

One prophet after another arose. But the blow fell 
in the course of another generation. In the year 722, 
the storm cloud which had been like a speck in the dim 
distance in the time of the first prophet, spread over 
the whole sky of the northern kingdom of Israel. It 
broke and fell, and the northern kingdom was no more, 
swept out of existence, as if it had never been there at 
all, and never to be restored again. The doom which 
the prophet had held forward as awaiting the Israel- 
ites in punishment for their iniquities, had come now at 
last. 


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Our story passes over to the Southern kingdom, to 
the Israelites centered around Jerusalem and the king- 
dom of Judah. 

There, too, prophecy was to appear and speak in 
like tones of thunder. There, too, was to come the 
voice of warning. Now it was to be heard at the very 
gates of Jerusalem. Who would dare to speak those 
thunder tones of wrath and woe within the precincts 
of that sacred city? 

But there also, a prophet came, the greatest of them 
all, and yet in a sense with only the same note or cry 
as that of his forerunner, Amos. 

I am speaking, of course, of Isaiah, the Jerusalem 
prophet. He is talking within the precincts of that 
sacred city, with the same old cry, “Thus saith the 
Lord.” 

‘Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of 
evil-doers, children that deal corruptly. They have forsaken 
the Lord ; they have despised the Holy One of Israel ; they are 
estranged and gone backward.” 

What could this mean? Was there not a temple 
of Yahweh in Jerusalem, and a priesthood there, and 
were there not offerings being made to their God 
all the time ? But our prophet goes on : 

“Why will ye be still stricken, that ye revolt more and more? 
The whole head is sick and the whole heart faint. From the 
sole of the foot, even to the head there is no soundness in it; 
but wounds and bruises, and festering sores. Hear the word 
of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the teaching 
of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.” 

Think of it ! Calling their city, the city of Yahweh, 
a Sodom and Gomorrah, and doing it in the name of 
God himself! What blasphemy it seemed! But he 
thunders on just the same: 

“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto 
me? I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of 
fed beasts. Bring no more vain oblations; your appointed 
feasts my soul hateth; I am weary to bear them. Wash you, 
make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before 
mine eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment, 
relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the 
widow.” 


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83 


And so the voice went on. Year after year Isaiah 
kept sounding his note of woe, “Cease to do evil : learn 
to do well,” and warning the people of the judgment 
to come. 

Throughout the Prophets you have this general cry 
of a Day of Judgment. If you undertook to read those 
pages through consecutively, you would grow weary 
of it as if it were always the same thing. But it is said 
in language which no other literature has ever equaled 
or ever approached. There is an awful sternness to it. 

The fire of the old prophecy had been kindled. It 
would not burn out. When the voice of Isaiah was 
no more, solemnly but drearily another voice arose. 
Once more it sounds in a monotone, but loud enough 
to be heard throughout Judea : 

“The godly man is perished out of the earth and there is 
none upright among men; they all lie in wait for blood; they 
hunt every man his brother with a net. Their hands are upon 
that which is evil to do it diligently ; the prince asketh, and the 
judge is ready for a reward. The best of them, is as a briar. 
The day of thy watchmen, even thy visitation is come ! now 
shall be their perplexity. Wherewith shall I come before the 
Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come be- 
fore him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? 
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of 
my body for the sin of my soul? What doth the Lord require 
of thee, but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk hum- 
bly with thy God?” 

Another mighty prophet was to come, however, as 
great if not greater than any who had gone before; 
one who was to foresee the destruction of Jerusalem 
and to live through it, and who was to die the martyr’s 
death of the prophet in a far away country. It was to 
be “Jeremiah.” 

At this point you will begin to observe that there 
are but two or three conspicuous key-notes in all this 
grand portion of the Bible. In one of those key-notes 
you have the philosophy of the true worship of deity. 

But the other key-note is equally profound, and 
gives us a Philosophy of History. In Jeremiah this 
new note is sounded with all its force. There stood this 
prophet of Israel, who was able to look back over all 


84 


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the calamity that had first swept over the northern 
kingdom and wiped it out of existence, and then swept 
down over Jerusalem. He had seen it, while he had 
read the handwriting on the wall. One or another of 
the prophets raised a voice of warning, telling of the 
punishment, in some form or another, which had to 
come upon iniquity. But whom was it to strike? 
Each and every man who committed evil? No, not 
necessarily. It was to fall upon the State, the whole 
people, upon Israel. 

To the prophet, Israel — the people, the race, the 
state, or the kingdom — was as much a reality as each 
man or woman who belonged to it. In society one per- 
son sometimes has to bear the punishment for the sins 
of another. But society itself, the race, the kingdom, 
the state, can sin ; and in doing so, must work out its 
own doom when it thinks it is working out success — if 
it has defied Ethical Law. This application of the sub- 
tle workings of ethical law to a whole race, a whole 
kingdom or a whole society, had in it something pro- 
found and far-reaching in its suggestiveness. Even 
to-day we have only half caught on to that great idea 
put forward by the prophets of Israel. But it was 
Jeremiah who dared to say: 

“Hear the word of the Lord, O King of Judah, that sits 
upon the throne of David, thou and thy servants, and thy 
people that enter in by these gates. Execute ye judgment and 
righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the 
oppressor, and do no wrong, no violence to the stranger, the 
fatherless nor the widow; neither shed innocent blood in this 
place. For if ye do this thing, indeed, then shall there enter 
in by the gates of this house, kings sitting upon the throne of 
David, riding in chariots and on horses, he and his servants 
and his people. But if ye will not hear these words, I swear 
by myself, saith the Lord, that this house shall become a deso- 
lation. ... I will punish you according to the fruit of 
yqur doings, saith the Lord. . . . Trust ye not in lying 
words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the 
Lord, the temple of the Lord, are these. If ye thoroughly 
amend your ways and doings, then will I cause you to dwell in 
this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers from of old, 
even forever more. . . . 

Then Jeremiah began to speak for himself, with 
anguish at his heart as he thought of the doom which 
was come upon Israel. 


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85 


“Oh, Jerusalem, wash thy heart from wickedness, that thou 
may’st be saved. . . . Thy ways and thy doings have pro- 
cured these things unto thee; this is thy wickedness; for it is 
hitter, it reacheth unto thy heart. T arr. pained at my very 
heart; I cannot hold my peace; because thou hast heard, oh, 
my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war, . . . . 
I beheld the earth, and lo ! it was waste and void ; and the 
heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and 
lo ! they trembled, and all the hills moved to and fro. I beheld, 
and lo ! there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were 
fled. I beheld, and lo ! the fruitful field was a wilderness, and 
all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the 
Lord, and before his fierce anger.” 

This was the great thought of Jeremiah; the con- 
ception of an Israel, a whole people which had sinned, 
and had to work out its own punishment. Nations, 
like individuals, can sin ; and because of that sinning, 
can die. It was by a spiritual insight that the prophet 
could assert it. To-day we know its truth by the new 
science of. Sociology. 

Not only in Jeremiah do we find this key-note as a 
philosophy of history. In point of fact it runs through 
all the prophets just the same. They are interpreting 
history by their moral sense ; that is all. And the two 
key-notes I have been speaking of, are usually being 
sounded at the same time or side by side all through 
these chapters at the close of the Old Testament. 

Yet I should mislead you entirely if I laid the sub- 
ject of prophecy down at this point. One other fea- 
ture is there, and a feature which comes nearer to the 
popular understanding of the word prophecy as a 
foretelling of the future. 

It seemed as if among those great teachers there 
ran a kind of faith concerning the future, which was 
most striking in contrast with their tones of despair. 
At the very time when they had reached the heights 
of their language of woe, picturing an inevitable doom 
for their people, every now and then their tones would 
change and they would begin to sound another key- 
note of hope and of promise. 

A Judgment shall come; the doom awaits us; we 
are to perish. That is what they keep saying once and 
again. But just as you reach the climax of this you 


86 


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come upon another phase. There is talk of a “rem- 
nant” ; and as our prophet strikes that word remnant, 
his voice changes. His notes of woe are sounded no 
longer. Softly at first and then more loudly, more 
energetically there rises a Jubilate. It all gathers 
around that word, the remnant; the remnant of the 
righteous. Not all shall perish. A remnant shall sur- 
vive. 

And out of the most appalling music of woe ever lis- 
tened to, there is drawn an element of hope for the 
future. An ideal has started which shall not die. The 
one Israel, that is, the Israel of the people as the peo- 
ple, shall perish. But there has been an ideal Israel 
which is not to die. It shall survive at first in a rem- 
nant only, and in a distant time shall become A New 
Jerusalem. Yahweh shall be true to his word. The 
ideal shall not perish from the earth. In that other 
prophecy where I read to you from Zephaniah, just 
after the language of woe, we meet with the other key- 
note : 

“The remnant of Israel shall not do iniquity, nor speak 
lies; neither shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth; 
for they shall feed and lie down, and none shall make them 
afraid. Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel; be glad 
and rejoice with all thy heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The 
Lord hath taken away thy judgments, he hath cast out thine 
enemy; the king of Israel, even the Lord, is in the midst of 
thee; thou shalt not fear evil any more. In that day it shall 
be said to Jerusalem, Fear thou not; O' Zion, let not thine 
hands be slack. The Lord thy God, is in the midst of thee, 
a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over thee with 
joy; he will rest in his love,, he will joy over thee with sing- 
ing. I will gather them that sorrow for the solemn assembly, 
who were of thee; to whom the burden upon her was a re- 
proach. Behold at that time, I will deal with all them that 
afflict thee ; and I will save her that halteth, and gather her 
that was driven away; and I will make them a praise and a 
name, whose shame hath been in all the earth. At that time 
will I bring you in, and at that time will I gather you; for 
I will make you a name and a praise among all the peoples of 
the earth, when I bring again your captivity before your eyes, 
saith the Lord.” 


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87 


This is our turning point. The music of a new 
epoch was beginning to sound, although of an epoch 
still centuries away. We have struck the notes of the 
Messianic Expectation. 


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THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


THE BELIEF IN GOD AS IT APPEARS 
IN THE BIBLE 


I may as well own first as last that beliefs about 
God have a fascination for me. I like to meet with 
them in poetry, in the Bible, in the early classical 
literature; and whenever I come upon those beliefs 
my attention is held at once. In fact, I can never let 
the subject alone. I like it and want to study it and 
I find it more and more interesting as the years go on. 
It continues to draw me, to move me, to inspire me. 

What makes the study of the beliefs about God 
so interesting is just this: By means of those beliefs 
we are able to trace the steps of growth of the moral 
sense. That is the secret of my enthusiasm for the 
study of theology. 

When going back to early times and tracing up 
the evolution of man, the best way to find out what 
man thought about right and wrong, how he distin- 
guished between good and evil, is to find out what he 
thought about God. It would seem to be a law of 
history that man’s idea of God must keep pace with 
the growth of the moral sense. It usually lags a lit- 
tle behind, but is always catching up, nevertheless. 
The human soul will not admit that the God which 
it believes in, can be inferior to its own ethical ideal. 
It will either have a deity up to that standard, or else 
no deity at all. If atheism has spread from time to 
time in various parts of the world, I venture to say 
it has been owing less to the influence of natural sci- 
ence than to the fact that the beliefs about a deity 
have been so slow in keeping pace with the growth 
of the ethical feeling. Usually when the God-idea 
does catch up with the most advanced ethical thought, 
some kind of a theism or belief in God comes back 
once more. 


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89 


Now of all opportunities which have ever been of- 
fered for tracing the growth of the moral sense by 
means of the beliefs about God, none begin to compare 
with the field open to us by means of the interpretation 
of the Bible which has been put forward by the new 
scholarship of which I have been speaking. We can 
trace that belief in all its stages by going back and 
tracing the growth of the Bible. It is all there, pass- 
ing from the lowest, crudest forms conceivable, up 
to the highest stage of thought on the subject which 
has ever been voiced in human language. 

But taking these Scriptures as they stand in the or- 
der in which the books are arranged, going simply by 
the traditions with regard to them, we find ourselves 
in hopeless confusion. It would seem as if the whole 
subject were turned inside out or upside down. The 
first work of the new scholarship, therefore, lay in one 
single direction. It was to arrange the books of the 
Bible, or the parts of those books, in their chronolog- 
ical order. When this had been done the task before 
them was an easy one comparatively. The value of 
the work of the new scholarship therefore has not been 
so much in the sphere of doctrine, or in its analysis 
of the history of theism, or of religion. It has been 
rather in the direction of sorting out the parts of the 
Scriptures and re-arranging the order. 

I gave you in round numbers the date 444 B. C. as 
the time when a Bible had come to be established. A 
canon of sacred Scripture was adopted about that time, 
along with the establishment of the Jewish Church. 
But it was not asserted that the whole Bible came into 
shape at that time, or that the books which we now 
look upon as sacred Scripture were accepted as a part 
of such a canon at that date, fn point of fact some of 
them had not yet been written. Furthermore, a num- 
ber of the finest books of the Bible had not been in- 
corporated in what was then accepted as Scripture. 
What became Bible at the famous date I have given 
you, was chiefly the so-called “Books of Moses,” the 
earlier historic books including the codes of law. It 
was the law, or “Moses” part of the Bible which first 


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became Sacred Scripture. The finest portion of the 
Old Testament, the Books of the Prophets, had 
scarcely been recognized as a part of the Bible, and 
only gradually came to be adopted or accepted into 
the canon. 

The Old Testament went on growing for upwards of 
250 years. It was from the year 444 down to about 
the second century before the Christian era that the 
Old Testament took shape. It was during that in- 
terval that two of the books of history called “Chroni- 
cles” were written, as well as certain other very impor- 
tant portions now belonging to the Bible. 

But taking that date, 444 B. C., we are able to recog- 
nize the standpoint of the Bible of that day as regards 
the belief in a God. We find at that time clear, pure, 
supreme, ethical monotheism as it existed probably 
nowhere else in the world. 

Now where are we to look for the sources of this 
monotheism. It had not come from Greece, because 
the monotheism at Athens in that age was a doctrine of 
the philosophers, not of the people. The philosopher 
walking in the streets of that city could see gods galore, 
and the people believed in those gods. 

It could not have come from India, this monotheism, 
because there, too, it was the doctrine of the few, and, 
furthermore, in that country it had about it the hazi- 
ness which goes with pantheism. The people of India 
by the millions believed in gods by the millions. 

But in Jerusalem at this date it was the people them- 
selves, the average citizen, who believed in the oneness 
of a God, and took the standpoint of a pure, clear, 
monotheism. The Church of Jerusalem was the 
church of the people, and its supreme standpoint was 
the belief in a one, only God. 

Under the circumstances we naturally turn to the 
Bible for explanation of it all, to the literature of the 
people in existence at that time. It is there that we 
expect to find it in all its fullness and completeness. 

But when we open the books which at that time had 
come to be accepted as sacred Scripture, as the founda- 
tion of the Church of Jerusalem and as containing the 


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91 


thoughts of the people and the church about their God, 
we meet with certain features which are sure to per- 
plex us. 

I open at the first chapter of Genesis and read the 
first line : “In the beginning God created the 
heaven and the earth.” Then I turn over to the sec- 
ond page and begin to read: “And the Lord God 
formed man of the dust of the ground.” That is in- 
teresting enough, but I certainly observe a change in 
the language. Why that phrase “Lord God”? On 
the first page it was simply “God.” Now, as you 
know, in the original Hebrew we have another name 
for the Deity on the second page of the Bible. In the 
first chapter the name of Elohim, which is translated 
“God.” In the second chapter the name is Yahweh, 
which is translated “Lord God.” In other places you 
find this name in the English Bible as “Jehovah,” 
which is now recognized, however, as having been an 
erroneous rendering of the Hebrew. 

And so at the very start we are struck with the fact 
that there are different names for the Deity in the 
Bible. What does this mean? If there is only one 
deity, why not one name? There must be some his- 
tory behind this circumstance. 

Furthermore, on examining this word Elohim, the 
first name for the Deity in the first words of the Bible, 
the scholar finds that it is a plural word which, trans- 
lated literally, means “gods.” We know well enough 
that many of the prophets used this name and meant by 
it only one God. But how came they to use the plural 
form? Behind all this there must have been a history. 
It points to something back in the prehistoric life of 
the human race. If the prophet had invented a name 
for his own God, would he have used the plural noun ?* 

A few facts like this make it plain to us at once that 
we are going to find something interesting here if we 
search this Bible for what it has to say about deity, for 

*While the use of the plural would seem to point to an or- 
iginal plurality of gods, it is also possible that Elohim was used 
as a so-called pluralis majestetis in the sense of “the great 
god” 


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THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


its conceptions of a God. We are going to find a his- 
tory there. We shall meet with evidences of a growth, 
of changes, of advance. We shall come upon stages, 
or strata as it were, in the thought-life of the human 
race. 

I am not tracing the growth and changes in this 
belief as it appears everywhere in the world, but only 
as it presents itself to us in the Bible. And I want 
you to see that there is no other one book where you 
can find out so much about that subject, and see it 
passing through so many phases. It is packed to- 
gether here under one cover, the history of the mind 
of man on this subject for over a hundred thousand 
years. 

Suppose now I give you one sample of this belief as 
we find it written here. I shall take what is usually 
recognized as the oldest passage in the Bible. It is so 
very ancient that the scholar is not able to translate it 
all, nor to decipher its full meaning. It is called, as 
you know, the Song of Deborah. It is to be found in 
the Book of Judges, which describes to us the condi- 
tions of the Israelites between the time when they left 
the wilderness of Sinai to go over into Palestine, and 
the time when they were united under one govern- 
ment as a kingdom by David, a period of about 250 
years preceding the year 1000 B. C. 

In those days the children of Israel were living in 
scattered tribes in the land of Canaan with no organ- 
ized government. They were still rude Arab tribes, 
and constantly at war with the people around them; 
sometimes victorious, but more often defeated. It 
seems that one of these tribes living in the southern 
part of that country was at war with another people 
whose leader’s name was Sisera. And a woman of un- 
usual strength or force of character by the name of 
Deborah, arose up in her might, summoned the chil- 
dren of Israel by the thousands and they went forth 
to battle and won a great victory. The leader of the 
enemy, Sisera, fled and came to the tent of a woman 
named Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. The woman 
invited the king to enter the tent, gave him water to 


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98 


drink, offered him food and allowed him to rest and 
sleep there. But when he was in slumber, as we are 
told, “Jael took a tent pin and took an hammer in her 
hand and went softly in to him and smote the pin into 
his temples, and it pierced through into the ground; 
for he was in a deep sleep and weary. So he died.” 

It is a gruesome picture. In fact it makes us shud- 
der, such a defiance of the laws of hospitality. It 
seems as if it were against any rule of war, an act of 
this kind. There is nothing fine or grand about it. 
Plainly it was an act of cruel treachery, and takes us 
back to the times when conscience had barely begun to 
show itself in the human race. 

But a victory had been achieved, the enemy of the 
Israelites had been overthrown; and over this victory 
we have the song of Deborah, one of the oldest pieces 
of literature, as I have said, in the Bible. It runs as 
follows : 

“Hear, O ye kings ; give ear, O ye sovereigns ! I to Yahweh 
will raise my song, will sing to Yahweh, Israel’s God. Yahweh, 
when from Seir thou settest out, when from the Land of 
Edom thou marchest, the earth trembled, the heavens swayed, 
the clouds dripped water, the mountains streamed at the pres- 
ence of Yahweh, Israel’s God Awake, awake, O 

Deborah ! Awake, awake, lift up the song ! . . . Curse 
Meroz says the messenger of Yahweh; curse its inhabitants 
bitterly because they come not to the aid of Yahweh, to the 
aid of Yahweh like heroes. Blessed above all women Jael, 
above all women in tents shall she be blessed. Water he asked 
(meaning, of course, the enemy, Sisera), milk she gave. . . . 
her hand she put forth to the pin ; her right hand to the. . . . 
and (then a blank for a passage too obscure to be interpreted) 

. . . . and smites, crushes his head, shatters, pierces his 

temple. At her feet he sank down, he fell, he lay; where he 
sank he lay of life bereft.” 

Then follows the striking passage giving us a picture 
of the mother of the king, Sisera, waiting at home for 
the return of her son, with an exulting description of 
what is in store for her when the news comes. _ What a 
suggestion we have of the primitive mind fairly wild 
with delight over the thought of a mother who was to 
receive news of the death of a son. And the song 
closes with an exultant shriek to the God of Israel over 


94 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


the triumph of the Israelites : “So perish thine enemies 
all , 0 Yahweh, but be thy friends as the sun when he 
rises in power ” 

And this is God, the Holy one of Israel. A God of 
vengeance, of cruelty, of treachery, a God whose bless- 
ings fall on a woman without heart, without conscience, 
without sense of honor, slaying her guest in a tent with 
the slyness of a fox, but with a wolflike ferocity. And 
why had the God of Israel done this? Because the 
people of Israel were any better in character or pur- 
poses than the Canaanites, their enemies? No; but 
because they had stood by Yahweh, therefore Yahweh 
was to stand by them. “So perish thine enemies all, 
O Yahweh, but be thy friends as the sun when he 
rises in power.” It almost makes us shudder, such a 
picture of the Holy One of Israel. 

But then the Bible is a large book and a whole lit- 
erature. Suppose we look again, and see what we 
find there. I may open at random somewhat, the col- 
lections of hymns sung in the honor or praise of 
Israel's God. This, too, is the Bible; the 103d Psalm: 

“Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that within me, bless 
his holy name. 

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. 

“Who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy 
diseases. 

“Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth 
thee with loving kindness and tender mercies. 

“Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy 
youth is renewed like the eagle’s. 

“The Lord executeth righteous acts and judgments for all 
that are oppressed. 

“He made known his ways unto Moses, his doings unto the 
children of Israel. 

“The Lord is full of compassion and gracious, slow to an- 
ger, and plenteous in mercy. 

“He will not always chide; neither will he keep his anger 
forever. 

“He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded 
us after our iniquities. 

“For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his 
mercy toward them that fear him. 

“As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he re- 
moved our transgressions from us. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


95 


“Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth 
them that fear him. 

“For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are 
dust. 

“As for man, his days are as grass ; as a flower of the field, 
so he flourisheth. 

“For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone ; and the place 
thereof shall know it no more. 

“But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to overlast- 
ing upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto chil- 
dren’s children. 

“To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember 
his precepts to do them. 

“The Lord hath established his throne in the heavens; and 
his kingdom ruleth over all. 

“Bless the Lord, ye angels of his ; ye mighty in strength, 
that fulfill his word, hearkening unto the voice of his word. 

“Bless the Lord, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that 
do his pleasure. 

“Bless the Lord, all ye his works, in all places of his do- 
minion bless the Lord, O my soul.” 

This, too, is God. But which is the God of the 
Bible? What am I to make of it? In this picture I 
have a deity with the tenderness of a mother ; a God 
of mercy and loving kindness, of gentleness and pity; 
a God who forgives and forgets ; one who has no ene- 
mies save those who are the enemies of what is right. 
Like as a father pitieth his children , so the Lord pit- 
ieth them that fear him; for he knoweth our frame , he 
remembereth that we are dust. It is a hymn of love, 
and makes us feel as if this universe were made for 
love ; that behind it all and at its center was a purpose ; 
that tenderness and loving kindness were the princi- 
ples on which and according to which all things took 
shape. At the core of all is love, says this psalmist, 
and at the core of the core is justice. “The Lord ex- 
ecuteth righteous acts, and judgment for all that are 
oppressed.” 

If in the midst of all the strife and contention of the 
world, of the mean, petty selfishness, of the struggle of 
“each man for himself and the devil take the hind- 
most ,, — if in face of all that which you see around 
you, you want to feel that while such a spirit is on the 
surface, at the core another spirit prevails — that in the 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


heart of things loving kindness and tender mercy dom- 
inate, I can only ask you to keep saying over the lines 
of this psalm. It is, in a sense, a Song Without Words, 
a sentiment; and it goes straight to the heart. 

Both songs come from the Bible. Which one is 
to speak for the God of the Bible? I look at the head 
lines of this song and it bears the title “A Psalm of 
David.” Now I am aware that King David belonged 
to about the same age as that in which Jael smote the 
tent pin through the temples of her enemy, and De- 
borah sang the war cry in praise of the vengeance-God. 
The two Gods do not fit together. 

But now steps in the new scholarship with a half 
smile over this tradition about these Psalms having 
been written by David. They study the language of 
this Psalm, analyze it word for word, and they dis- 
cover that it belongs somewhere about the time 
when the Book of Jonah was written. In a word, 
it belongs to that epoch when the Bible was taking its 
complete shape, after the year 444 B. C. There would 
have been about as much likelihood for this psalm 
to have been written by David as for it to have been 
written by Prince Bismarck. It is practically estab- 
lished now by the new scholarship that David had 
nothing to do with writing the Psalms. The majority 
of those hymns belong to that epoch when the Bible 
was coming to be accepted by the people after the 
exile. 

And so there is light ahead for us in answer to that 
question, which is the God of the Bible. The first 
deity, that of the Song of Deborah, was Israel’s God 
in the eleventh or twelfth century before the Christian 
era. The second deity, that of this psalm, was Is- 
rael’s God in the fourth or fifth century. There had 
been a lapse of five or six hundred years. I could 
point out the steps to you if I had time, and you could 
see how the God of Fury and Vengeance in the Song 
of Deborah, had developed in the minds of the people 
of Israel into the God of Mercy and Loving-kindness 
in the 103d Psalm. Give the human race time; only 
give it time and light is sure to come. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


97 


The first ray of new light, religiously speaking, as I 
told you, came from the prophets of Israel. The 
eventful epoch was the eighth century before the 
Christian era. Across the thick darkness of that crude, 
cruel, grotesque God-idea in the Song of Deborah, 
there came the sudden flash of a new conception of 
deity in the voice of the Hebrew prophet. David knew 
not of it ; Moses had only had a faint inkling of it ; but 
the rays appeared on the horizon in the eighth cen- 
tury and the tide turned. The God of Deborah 
was to change into the God of the 103d Psalm. It all 
came within a short few hundred years. 

Even such changes, however, can only come by 
stages. It was not the prophet who first announced 
the God of Love. It was not the early prophet who 
wrote the 103d Psalm. First there had been the Ven- 
geance-deity of the Song of Deborah, the God who 
stood by those that stood by Him. Then came the 
Justice-deity, who was the God of the prophet. As I 
told you, the keynote of the prophecy of the Old Tes- 
tament was judgment, denunciation for the sins of the 
people, and the proclamation that only those who did 
right should have the favor of God. The prophet had 
found out that standing by the right was the only real 
way by which a man stood by the Deity. The pro- 
phet’s deity was the Justice-God. That was the sec- 
ond stage of which I told you in the preceding lecture. 
And lastly came the Deity of the psalmist, the Love- 
God. This new conception of deity came in the 
thought of the Israelites because of their experience 
over hundreds of years of history. They had seen 
that in one way loyalty to their cause, the cause of 
Yahweh, had triumphed. Jerusalem was restored to 
the people of Israel. They were back from their exile, 
once more in their sacred city. What wonder that at 
last it came natural for them to sing : 

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, who forgiveth all thine iniqui- 
ties, who healeth all thy diseases, who redecmeth thy life from 
destruction, who crowneth thee with loving kindness and ten- 
der mercies.” 


98 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


But this is only one phase of the great change 
which took place in the theistic beliefs of the people 
of that time. It meant not so much that there was only 
one deity, but that the deity was a God of love and 
justice. 

But what about this belief in the oneness of deity 
itself? How shall we find that in the Bible? Why 
it is there before our eyes, you say. It is in the lan- 
guage of the prophets. It is voiced in the psalms ; over 
and over they talk of one only God. 

True, but I keep reminding you that the Bible is 
a big book, and that there is a great deal in it. What 
about that plural form for a name of the Deity ? Does 
it point to the fact that the children of Israel had al- 
ways been monotheists? Suppose I open once more 
my Bible on the first page. In the account of the 
creation I read: 

“And God said let us make man in our image, after 
our likeness.” Why that “us,” and the “our” ? Did the 
one who wrote that, believe that there were gods rather 
than a god? No, surely, because this first chapter of 
Genesis belongs, perhaps, to one of the later documents 
in the Bible, written after many of the prophets had 
spoken, and upwards of a thousand years after the 
time of Moses. He is using a “conventional” lan- 
guage, here where he uses the plural form for the 
name of the Deity. But it points to a prehistoric time 
when man did believe in gods and not in God. The 
evidences for this fact are manifest over and over 
again in one place after another in these Scriptures. 
We see how such conventional language points to a 
time when that language arose as meaning just what it 
said, no less and no more. 

What about the first commandment in the Deca- 
logue? It has ranked conspicuously as the proclama- 
tion of a clear, pure, supreme monotheism. But I am 
afraid it will not stand the test. What does it say? 
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” You 
notice form of speech. It does not say, “I am the 
only God.” If I had the time I could show you again 
and again how the children of Israel in the early days 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 99 

did think of the other gods of the Canaanites as being 
really gods, and how the early teachers of the people 
looked upon those deities in the same light as real 
beings. Nay, further, it would seem as if the first 
prophets themselves were not out-and-out monotheists. 

Did they not come out boldly denouncing the wor- 
ship of the other gods, and proclaiming the supreme 
worship of Yahweh? True enough; but read their 
language closely, and the point of it is that they de- 
nounced worship of the other gods, not because those 
deities were not gods, but because they were not the 
Gods or God of Israel. The first cry of the prophet is 
not ‘‘Yahweh is the only God,” but “Yahweh is the 
only God for Israel.” The supreme effort both of 
priest and prophet had been to establish a system of 
separation, to cut off the Israelites from the Canaan- 
ites, and to do it supremely by separating them in 
their worship of their gods or their God. 

You can see, therefore, in this phase of the subject, 
the three stages as well. It is all on the surface to 
those who read the Bible carefully. In that use of a 
plural form for the name of the Deity you see how at 
an early epoch, far back in the dim past, deity for the 
Israelites was “Gods” and not a “God.” * 

Then came the second stage, and the one which 
may have begun as the great achievement of Moses, 
who seems to have given the children of Israel a new 
name for their deity. This gave the starting point 
for a separate “God of Israel.” The second stage in 
the evolution of the one-deity idea, came by establish- 
ing a certain aristocracy among the deities; one god 
being more worthy than the others, it was the func- 
tion of Israel to bring out or emphasize this aristoc- 
racy. What the prophet first did was to point out that 
their God was the best God. It was not because he 
was the God of the best people, Israel, that he was 
the best God, but the people of Israel were the best 
people because they had the best God. You see, there 
was a tremendous change, a great turn-about, and it 


*See note i, p. 9 1 - 


100 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


meant almost a revolution rather than evolution. This 
was the great standpoint of the early prophets. 

Not until the last awful catastrophe was approach- 
ing, not until the northern kingdom had been de- 
stroyed by the Assyrians, not until the dark storm 
cloud from Babylon was approaching Judea and the 
day for the fall of Jerusalem was at hand, not until 
then did there arise the supreme monotheism of the 
Israelites. It came in with the great prophet Jere- 
miah, who saw the kingdom overthrown, the city 
burned to ashes, the people carried away captive, and 
himself at last dying an exile in Egypt. Not until 
Jeremiah appeared and Jerusalem was no more, did 
it come over the people that the gods of other na- 
tions had no existence. In the awful judgment which 
had struck the city it would seem as if this prophet 
had pierced the veil of the Inscrutable itself, and by 
the handwriting on the wall he proclaimed the fact: 
There is only one judge. Out of the fall of Jerusa- 
lem and the overthrow of the City of God itself came 
the belief that there was only one Deity or one God. 

But this One-Deity of the Israelites in the year 444 
had still other characteristics besides his oneness. Su- 
preme even over that, was the conception of deity as a 
spiritual being, the invisible, inscrutable, without form 
and without body, dwelling in the Holy of Holies, 
where mortal eye could not penetrate, a being who 
could be known to man, only because of the spiritual 
something in man himself. And there is a solemn 
grandeur in this Bible conception of a supremely 
spiritual deity. It is cold in its way; it takes us on 
the heights where the atmosphere is serene. But not 
all men can thrive in that atmosphere; for in fact in 
such an atmosphere not all men can find any indica- 
tion of God. 

And yet it is true. Had you gone into the temple at 
Jerusalem in the day when a canon of Scripture had 
been adopted and the Bible accepted by the people, 
you would have found no God-image there. 

Suppose I turn and read yoja a poetic passage from 
another of the Psalms. Hete', too, we shall be read- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


101 


mg of the Deity, and this language may have been sung 
in the temple at Jerusalem as one way of suggesting 
what man felt in that time concerning God. 

“The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; 
my God, my strong rock ; in him will I trust. 

“In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my 
God. He heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry before 
him came into his ears. 

“Then the earth shook and trembled, the foundations also 
of the mountains moved and were shaken, because he was 
wroth. 

“There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of 
his mouth devoured ; coals were kindled by it. 

“He bowed the heavens also and came down; and thick 
darkness was under his feet. 

“And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly ; yea, he flew swift- 
ly upon the wings of the wind. 

“He made darkness his hiding place, his pavilion round about 
him ; darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies. 

At the brightness before him his thick clouds passed, hail 
stones and coals of fire. 

“The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Most 
High uttered his voice ; hail stones and coals of fire. 

“And he sent out his arrows and scattered them ; yea, light- 
nings manifold, and discomfited them. 

“Then the channels of water appeared, and the foundations 
of the world were laid bare, at thy rebuke, O Lord, at the blast 
of the breath of thy nostrils. 

“He sent from on high, he took me; he drew me out of 
many waters.” 

Is it not magnificent, that picture ! Does it not stir 
one to think of a force invisible behind all that up- 
heaval in Nature ; the clouds and darkness, hailstones, 
the coals of fire, the lightning, the channels of water, 
what are they in this psalm? Are they deity? Are 
they God? By no manner of means. They are sym- 
bols of the invisible, inscrutable Power. 

Because the Psalmist knows that he cannot describe 
the invisible, because the spiritual cannot be put into 
concrete form or language, he takes the events of the 
natural world as he sees them, and pictures them as 
symbols of what eye cannot see, and yet of what the 
mind knows and believes in. This is not Nature-wor- 
ship. In a true sense it is a picture of a spiritual God. 
It is poetry or sentiment, music rather than language. 


102 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


It, too, ranks by tradition as a Psalm of David ; but 
it, too, has been placed by the new scholarship hun- 
dreds of years after the death of David. It belongs 
just about to the time of Jeremiah, the first great mo- 
notheistic prophet. But is the language of Scripture 
always so easily to be interpreted as indicating a spir- 
itual conception of the Deity? What if we turn back 
to the passage where we have sketched for us the 
giving of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai, when Mores 
brought forth the people out of the camp “to meet 
God” : 

“And they stood at the nether part of the mount, and mount 
Sinai was altogether in smoke because the Lord descended 
upon it in fire; and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke 
of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And the 
Lord came down upon mount Sinai. All the people saw the 
thunderings and the lightnings, and the voice of the trumpet 
and the mount smoking; and when the people saw it they 
trembled and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, speak 
thou for us and we will hear; but let not God speak with us 
lest we die. And the people stood afar off and Moses drew 
near unto the darkness where God was.” 

Is that symbol, I ask? Do you see a difference 
between the language there and the language of the 
Psalmist? It is more than symbol. We are back in 
history by some hundreds of years. What in the time 
of the Psalmist was symbol, the storm-cloud and the 
thunderbolt speaking for God, in the prehistoric time 
was fact. God was the storm, the storm was God’; 
and in this language in the Book of Exodus telling 
us of what happened around Mount Sinai we are back 
nigh to the prehistoric world. This is the language of 
a far-away time. It has not yet quite become symbol. 
Unquestionably the people around Mount Sinai saw 
what they considered the living God in the storm- 
cloud which hung over its summit. It was the Mount 
of God. 

And the instinct which leads the spiritually mnided 
man, thinking of an invisible deity, to speak of that 
deity in the language of Nature, to clothe his concep- 
tion in form, to wrap around it what he sees going on 
before his eyes — this which was instinct to the Psalm- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


10S 


ist and is instinct to us to-day, and which we and the 
Psalmist alike recognize as being language only in 
symbols, this points back to the time when instinct 
made out of Nature or the occurrences of Nature an 
actual god. The storm-cloud was not a symbol then; 
it was the Deity. 

Beyond a doubt the forefathers of the people of 
Jerusalem of the year 444 had worshiped their deity as 
the God of the storm. The thunderbolt had been the 
actual arm of God. 

Think of the change in the attitude of the human 
mind, tracing it backward from that 103d Psalm, where 
man thought of his deity as a being of gentleness and 
loving kindness, a tender father ; and that other attitude 
of the people around Mount Sinai, who said in terror : 
“Let our God not speak to us lest we die.” Why that 
fear and terror? Because to the Israelites of that time 
a thunderbolt did strike and kill, and the storm-cloud 
which wielded that thunderbolt was the Deity. It 
was “Jehovah.” 

What is symbol to-day, was fact to the mind of our 
forefathers. What is poetry to-day, to them was real- 
ity. What we talk of as the garment of deity, to them 
was deity itself. It is all written here in the language 
of the Bible. You can trace the evolution of the hu- 
man consciousness in the stages the mind went 
through, from the Nature-God to the God behind all 
Nature. 

It is true also that the God the Israelites worshiped 
at Jerusalem in the year 444 was not worshiped by 
people who were idolaters. Alone of all the race of 
men in the world at that time it may be said that they 
had no image of their God. And we are told how this 
attitude had begun with Moses. But when we look 
at it from that standpoint it is all meaningless. We 
can get no history out of it. 

Rearrange the books of the Bible so as to place them 
in their chronological order, and you can see how the 
children of Israel went through all the stages of devel- 
opment from idolatry up to their belief in an imageless 
God. What of that “brazen serpent” we are told of, 


104 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


made by Moses in the wilderness, at which all the peo- 
ple were to look and be saved from the poison of the 
serpent’s bite. According to any ordinary rational in- 
terpretation of literature, that serpent was a god. 

What of the “ark” which was so dear to the chil- 
dren of Israel ? Did they not feel that their God lived 
in it, that it was his dwelling place? Where it went, 
there went terror to the enemy of Israel. Why did 
they carry that ark to battle with them if they did not 
believe that it was the abode of their God? And 
when in the land of Canaan the kingdom had been set 
up under David and afterwards was divided at the 
death of Solomon, and another kingdom established in 
the north, do you remember how the new king there 
set up two golden calves and said: “It is too much 
for you to go up to Jerusalem; behold thy Gods of 
Israel which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” 
“And,” we are told, “he set one in Bethel and the other 
put he in Dan.” 

Did it seem strange to the people ; did it shock them 
as being idolatrous, offering them images of their 
God which had brought them out of the land of Egypt 
and out of the house of bondage? No, they took it 
as a matter of course, because, up to that time, it had 
not come to be recognized as a sin to make images of 
the Deity. The second commandment : Thou shalt not 
make unto thee any graven image, had not yet been 
put forth among the people. 

If the new scholarship has established anything for a 
certainty, it is that the Israelites grew out of a stage of 
idolatry, just as they grew out of a stage of polytheism. 
If it is true that God-worship at Mount Sinai was asso- 
ciated with worship of the storm-cloud, so in Canaan 
to the Israelite, Yahweh-worship or God-worship was 
associated with bull-worship. Only gradually could 
the later prophets shake the people from this habit. 
Not until hundreds of years after the death of Moses 
did the prophet turn and tell the people that images of 
a deity had no sancity to them. 

In this respect, too, you can see the same symbolism. 
What of that temple at Jerusalem built on the return 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


105 


of the exiles from Babylon, and in connection with 
which the Bible was established as a code of worship 
for the people? No image of the Deity was there, to 
be sure! But what of the “horns” at the altar? What 
of the basin resting on the figures of twelve oxen? 
Does that mean anything? Were those oxen deities 
to the Israelites? By no manner of means. Had 
those horns a significance as being part of their God? 
Surely not. To the mass of the people they had no 
meaning ; they were there only as a symbol. But what 
was now a symbol had been a fact. 

To the people who assembled in the temple at Jeru- 
salem in 444, they had a significance as symbols, it may 
be. But what was symbol then, had been fact before. 
A few hundred years before that time their own fore- 
fathers had worshiped bulls as images of their God, 
Yahweh, and even the priests of the time had not 
thought to rebuke them. 

Only when the prophet came, who wished to sepa- 
rate Yahweh-worship from the other God- worship of 
the Canaanites, and to separate the children of Israel 
at the same time, only then came the new attitude 
which forbade images of God. And it came undoubt- 
edly as a method by which the children of Israel could 
be separated from the Canaanites. Because the other 
people worshiped their gods and images, therefore it 
must not be done by the Israelites. 

What shall we say of the fact of the reverence for 
that ark of which I have told you, as being carried by 
the Israelites into battle because their God went with 
it; and on the other hand the famous saying of Solo- 
mon in the speech he made when consecrating the 
great temple at Jerusalem not long after the death of 
David — one of the grandest speeches which ever 
fell from human lips. Just at the very moment when 
he was talking of the glory of the temple which he 
had builded to God as a seat of worship in Jerusalem, 
an as an abode for the Deity himself, he cries : 

“Will God in very deed dwell on the earth. Behold the 
heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how 
much less this house that I have builded.” 


106 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


Again we raise the question, which is the God of the 
Bible, the one who lived in the ark and went with it 
to do battle for the Israelites, as if he abode in that 
ark; or the God of whom the prophet could say, “Be- 
hold heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain 
thee?” It is all plain enough when the new scholar- 
ship steps in and shows us how this “Book of Kings” 
was written, in which we have the account of the build- 
ing of the temple by Solomon. We have it established 
that the books of “Kings” were compiled about four 
hundred years after the death of Solomon, and that 
this speech was undoubtedly written by the man who 
compiled the books. This is not the language of Solo- 
mon. It is the language of the prophet of Israel after 
prophecy had arisen, and the prophet’s God had been 
brought to the minds of the people. 

Read the language at the climax of this evolution 
in the prophet Jeremiah, who lived at the very time 
when the compiler of the Book of Kings was doing his 
work and had put that great speech in the mouth of 
Solomon. The prophet is saying: 

“The customs of the peoples are vanity; for one cutteth a 
tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman 
with the ax.” 

Do you see the satire ? Gods then are human handi- 
work. The idols which the nations revered were “The 
work of the hands of the workman with the ax.” Of 
course, we say, what else could they be? But the 
prophet continues — 

“They deck it with silver and gold ! they fasten it with nails 
and with hammers that it move not. They are like a palm tree 
of turned work and speak not; they must needs be borne be- 
cause they cannot go.” 

It is of the idols he is speaking now, you under- 
stand, made from wood cut out of the tree of the for- 
est, the work of the hands of the workman with the 
ax. Those idols speak not ; they must needs be home 
because they cannot go. The prophet goes on to say : 

“Be not afraid of them, for they cannot do evil; neither is 
it in them to do good.” 


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107 


Can you fancy the changes that were taking place 
to have brought about such an attitude of mind? It 
was one thing not to worship the gods of the nations, 
the image-gods of the heathen ; but it was another thing 
not to be afraid of them. Surely while they were not 
like the God of Israel, they might be spirits which could 
do evil. But hear the scorn of the prophet over those 
blocks of wood and stone, and then listen to his exal- 
tation over Yahweh, the God of Israel, as he continues : 

“There is none like unto thee, O Lord ; thou are great and 
thy name is great in might. Who would not fear thee, O King 
of the nations ; for as much as among all the wise men of the 
nations there is none like unto thee.” 

Then he turns back, this prophet, in scornful lan- 
guage about those image-gods whom he despises. As 
he says : 

“They are all the work of cunning man. But the Lord is 
the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king. 
At his wrath the earth trembleth .and the nations are not able 
to abide his indignation. He hath made the earth by "his 
power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and by 
his understanding hath he stretched out the heavens. . Every 
goldsmith is put to shame by his graven image; for his mol- 
ten image is falsehood and there is no breath in them. They 
are vanity and the work of delusion.” 

The climax had come. At about the year 1300 B. C. 
Moses had begun to organize the people into a state, 
to lay the foundations of an Israel. He had given 
the impulse, but not the philosophy, for it. He had 
given them a new name for their God, “Yahweh,” the 
God of Israel. 

But there still survived the animal worship in the 
brazen serpent, and the ark with its two tables of 
stone, which point to a prehistoric age in the worship 
of wood and stone, an original fetichism. 

The people of Israel carried with them into Pales- 
tine the new name for their God, Yahweh, the God of 
Israel ; but with them came the ark and the two tables 
of stone. Their God was still the god of the storm- 
cloud, the vengeance-God. The deities of the nations 
around them were also living gods in the eyes of the 


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Israelites, to be feared, to be appropriated, but not 
quite on the same plane to be worshiped like “Yah- 
weh.” 

Yet Yahweh, the God of Israel, also abode in images 
of wood and stone. In the altars, on the “high places,” 
in the form of a calf or bull, he was still Yahweh, and 
worshiped even yet with offerings of human blood, 
with the sacrifice of human lives. 

About the year 1000 B. C., just after the death of 
David, came Solomon, who built the first temple to 
Yahweh at Jerusalem, and then the new impulse was 
given to a supreme Yahweh- worship. There was the 
starting point out of which was to come the worship 
of one, only, real God. But the bull-worship survived 
until the mighty epoch came, the turning point in the 
eighth century, about 750 B. C., when the first prophets 
appeared. 

Yet those early prophets had not struck the full note 
of monotheism. The note they had sounded was that 
of the supremacy of Yahweh, the God of Israel. At 
last, just when the doom was threatening Jerusalem, 
or at the time of its fall, a greater prophet appeared, 
wearing the mantle of sorrow, but with a prophetic in- 
sight rather than prophetic foresight. He is the one 
who says, the gods of the nations are vanity, “wood 
and stone.” And thus about the year 600 B. C. we 
reach the stage of a clear, pure monotheism. 

But the monotheism of Jeremiah was the monothe- 
ism of the prophet, not of the people. It was the voice 
of the leader in advance of the men around him. It 
was to Jerusalem like the monotheism of Plato in 
Athens. 

Not until that people, the Israelites, had been tried 
by affliction, not until their city had been destroyed 
and they had lived in exile far away from Palestine — 
not until then were the leaders able to put forth this 
new conception of God as a standpoint for the people. 
In the year 444 B. C., in round numbers, the church 
was established, and its foundation or cornerstone was 
the standpoint of Jeremiah, the belief in a one, 
only, supreme, spiritual, imageless God. 


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109 


And which is the God of the Bible ? All this is con- 
tained there. I can pass from the first chapters where 
I read of God “walking in the garden in the cool of 
the day,” down to the exalted language of the psalm- 
ist or of the prophet : 

“Have I not known? Have I not heard? Hath it not been 
told you from the beginning? Have ye not understood from 
the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the 
circle of the earth; for the inhabitants thereof are as grass- 
hoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and 
spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in ; that bringeth princes 
to nothing. He maketh the judges of the earth as vanity. To 
whom then will I liken me, saith the Holy One?” 

I have given you the story and traced for you the 
God-belief in the Bible. You have seen it in many 
forms and many shapes. Which is the God of the 
Bible ? I leave you to decide. 


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THE MESSIANIC EXPECTATION 


I touch on a delicate and difficult problem in the 
theme before me in this lecture. In this study of the 
History of the Bible we are coming now to the issues 
which have convulsed nations and caused the rise and 
fall of kingdoms. But my aim will be to present you, 
as far as lies in my power, the facts as they have been 
unfolded by the new scholarship. It is with facts 
rather than doctrines that we are concerned. 

The basis of the Messianic expectation is usually 
sought for in the well-known and beautiful language 
of the ‘‘Second” Isaiah : 

“Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak 
ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her war- 
fare is accomplished; that her iniquity is pardoned; that she 
has received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. The 
voice of one that crieth, Prepare ye in the wilderness the way 
of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our 
God. Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and 
hill shall be made low. And the crooked shall be made 
straight and the rough places plain ; and the glory of the Lord 
shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together; for the 
mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. Oh, thou that tellest good 
tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountains ; oh thou 
that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, lift tip thy voice with 
strength; lift it up, be not afraid. Say unto the cities of Ju- 
dah, behold your God! Behold the Lord God will come as a 
Mighty One and his arm shall rule for him. Behold his re- 
ward is with him and his recompense before him. He shall 
lead his flock like a shepherd, he shall gather the lambs in 
his arm and carry them in his bosom and shall gently lead 
them that give suck.” 

They are the words, if I remember correctly, which 
make the starting point of Handel’s Messiah. You 
notice, I say that they were the basis of a Messianic 
Expectation ; but observe carefully that there is naught 
in them concerning what we should now think of as 
a personal Messiah. 

This language of the prophet was spoken at an 
eventful epoch in the world’s history. It was near 


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111 


the close of the period of exile for the Jews at Baby- 
lon. They had been there for a period of fifty years, 
away from their dear land and city, captives among 
a people who knew not Yahweh, the God of Israel. 
And now with singular foresight, a new prophet had 
arisen among the exiles, who saw the doom which was 
to overwhelm the empire of Babylon. It was charac- 
teristic of these old monarchies in the East, that they 
had vitality for only a limited period ; after which, de- 
cay was sure to set in, and some other great leader 
of a sturdier people would arise from outside, to set 
up a new kingdom and to destroy the one in decay. 
Already, as this prophet was speaking, the storm- 
cloud of the new leader’s armies was on the horizon. 
His name was in people’s mouths. The prophet had 
heard it and could see what was approaching. The 
armies were drawing nigh from the East. Babylon 
was to fall and the exiled Jews to go free. As if 
speaking for the Lord, the prophet anticipates the 
coming of Cyrus from Persia, saying : 

“I have raised up one from the north and he shall come. 
From the rising of the sun one that calleth upon my name; 
and he shall come upon rulers as upon mortar, and as the 
potter treadeth clay. I have raised him up for victory and 
I will make straight all his ways ; he shall build my city again, 
and he shall let my exiles go free. I am the Lord that saith 
of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleas- 
ure, even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built, and to the 
temple, Thy foundation shall be laid again.” 

It is the language of the prophet, who goes under 
the name of the Second Isaiah. His expectations, to 
a limited extent, were realized; the exiles were “let 
go free,” and they went back to rebuild the city of 
Jerusalem. All the “comfort” which had been prom- 
ised, to be sure, did not come ; but of that I will speak 
later. 

Almost a hundred years went by before Jerusalem 
was fully restored, the temple built and the Jewish 
Church established. 

The historic books of the Old Testament close with 
that eventful epoch, around the date 444 B. C. 


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The next great date in the history of the Bible is 
connected with the year 4 B. C., which is now looked 
upon as having been the birth year of Jesus of Naza- 
reth, and around which we associate the appearance 
of Christianity. 

Humanly speaking I shall deal with Jesus as the 
last of the prophets, no less and no more. But this at- 
titude is not necessarily in conflict with a further su- 
pernatural interpretation by which many see a great 
deal more there. That is strictly a problem of theol- 
ogy, and with that I am not here concerned. In my 
own mind I take comparatively little interest in the 
doctrinal disputes on this subject. I stand outside, or 
apart from both attitudes. Every event in history 
may have a natural and a supernatural interpretation. 
Whether you take one of these interpretations, or both 
of them, is for you a matter of choice. The doctrinal 
problems are not solved by a study of the Bible. They 
belong rather to the realm of metaphysics. As to 
how much or how little there was of God incarnate 
in Jesus I leave you to decide for yourselves. 

It is doubtful whether a single statement which I 
am making in these lectures might not be accepted by 
certain of the clergy of this country, as well as of 
Europe, who are in good and regular standing in the 
orthodox church. 

It is known that the general standpoint which I 
am unfolding to you, concerning the Bible, has been 
spreading among educated people throughout Chris- 
tendom, and that it is gaining in influence in this 
country, although it is more prevalent among the 
scholars of Europe. I merely wish to make you see 
that the standpoint from which I am giving these lec- 
tures is not one which you need be afraid of, as if it 
were coming from just one person, as it were, and 
which, therefore, must be taken with caution. It is 
a tendency of thought throughout Christendom, which 
I am describing to you. 

I say to you, therefore, that those who choose to 
accept the Bible as the “inspired word of God” need 
not necessarily be anxious or seriously concerned lest 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


113 


they become radicals or atheists. And those who are 
radicals, wishing to look upon the Bible as the “word 
of man/’ need not be alarmed lest I should be trying 
to win them over to a basis of supernaturalism. I am 
presenting you an array of facts and a certain natural 
connection between facts, and nothing more. 

We have come to a most important event in the 
history of religious thought — in social and political 
history as well as in the history of the Bible. I take 
the year 4 B. C. as the new starting point and ask 
myself what was the general attitude of mind among 
the people in Judea, or around Jerusalem, at that time: 
and raise the question whether it can be accounted 
for by what is contained in the Old Testament, or in 
that portion of the Bible which had been written up 
to the year 444 B. C. 

In the first place, we come upon a belief quite gen- 
eral among the people of the time, in a future resur- 
rection of the dead and in a personal immortality. 
Now, what am I to make of this ? 

Surely, when once such a belief has established it- 
self, it must have important influence. Yet it is the 
growing opinion of scholars that in no single passage 
of those portions of the Bible which had been written 
up to the year 444 B. C. with the establishment of 
the Jewish Church, is there a plain statement of such 
a belief. It was not the general belief of the great 
prophets of the Bible, nor of Moses, nor of the writers 
of the historic books of the Bible. 

Bear in mind, as I have told you, that only about 
two-thirds, or at the most three-fourths, of the Old 
Testament had been written at that time. The Bible 
did not come to its present state until about 250 years 
after. It was during these 250 years that most of 
the “Psalms” were written, that the “Book of 
Proverbs” was made up, and probably that the Book 
of “Job” was written, as well as some of the books 
by the “minor” prophets. Yet the opinion is also 
growing very strong that there is not a clear inti- 
mation of this belief of immortality, or the resur- 
rection of the dead, even in any of the Psalms. Most 


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of the books of the Bible written during that 250 
years, are in keeping with the spirit of the earlier 
portions which had been written before that time. 
Only in two or three instances do we have a striking 
exception to this. But in these exceptions we do 
come upon this other belief. 

Furthermore, at this epoch, we meet with the kin- 
dred beliefs in the coming of a final Judgment Day, 
with a heaven awaiting the souls of the righteous, and 
a hell awaiting the souls of the wicked. Naught of 
this likewise is to be found in the Bible as it had been 
written up to that year 444 B. C. 

Besides this, and most striking, we come upon a 
host of new names of angels, with a complete angel- 
ology. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is not alone, al- 
though he is supreme as God. At this time we find 
the people thinking of hosts of inferior beings sur- 
rounding their God — an angel world; and this angel 
world is divided up into a hierarchy, with leaders, 
each having his special name and possibly special 
characteristics or with special functions to perform. 
There is also a division between the good angels and 
the bad angels, so that we have a host of evil spirits 
with a hierarchy and a leader or prince over them. 

One of these princes of the angel world, apparently 
was a household name among the people of this time 
and was playing a most important role in the beliefs 
of the people. It was Satan, the evil spirit. Now all 
this angelology with its divisions, its cohorts or armies, 
with princes and leaders, such as we find for instance 
in Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” including both the good 
and evil angels, all this was something foreign to the 
Old Testament when the Jewish Church was first es- 
tablished. It is possible that Satan is mentioned by 
name two or three times by the prophets, scarcely 
more. There is, in a general way, allusion to “an- 
gels” who may have come to earth as messengers of 
Yahweh, but they are not individualized. It was evi- 
dently a subordinate or minor feature in the older re- 
ligious beliefs. 


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115 


All this has to be accounted for as having grown 
up since a canon of scripture was adopted, and after 
that epoch at which the historic books of the Bible 
come to an end. 

Humanly speaking, Christianity as a religion would 
be incomprehensible to us, and its rise without mean- 
ing, if we connect it with Judaism at the time when the 
historic books of the Old Testament came to their 
close. It belongs to another world, rather than to a 
Jerusalem of 444 Bi. C. The popular state of mind 
to which it addressed itself cannot be found in the 
Old Testament. 

Only, therefore, as we get an insight into that epoch 
between 444 B. C. and the birth of Jesus, can we have 
any sort of understanding of the rise of Christianity. 
Bear in mind that in studying the rise of a new re- 
ligion, almost as much importance has to be attached 
to the general attitude of the mind of the people when 
it arose, as to the new teachings of that religion itself. 
These “teachings” are addressed to what the people 
are thinking about. Therefore, I say, that “humanly 
speaking,” we must find the background for the rise 
of Christianity in what had been going on during these 
four preceding centuries, after the larger portion of the 
Old Testament had been written and after the great 
prophets had spoken. 

In a certain way the transition ages of history are 
more important for study than what we call the “epoch- 
making” ages. But they are not so easy to investi- 
gate or to understand, for the very reason that the 
events of these ages do not center around a few 
leaders, or one leader. You cannot get your perspec- 
tive as easily ; you are not able to fix on certain strik- 
ing events out of which all the others are to be ex- 
plained. 

But I have not touched on another popular faith 
of that new epoch. What shall we say as to the ex- 
pectation of a Messiah? We have reason to believe 
that the atmosphere was full of talk at that time, about 
the coming of a new prince, the “Anointed One” who 
was to be Israel's “Deliverer.” Both the humble peas- 


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ants around the Lake of Galilee, as well as the sages 
of Jerusalem, were talking of this. There was an at- 
mosphere of expectation, as if at last the Messiah was 
coming. 

It may seem somewhat strange to you when I assert 
that there is comparatively little in the Old Testament 
concerning the coming of such a Messiah; and still 
less will you find there, if you judge only by the great 
prophets, or by those portions of the Bible which had 
been written before the restoration of Jerusalem. 
This expectation of the coming of a Messiah must, 
therefore, be accounted for during this transitional 
epoch in the four centuries to which I have alluded. 

It is with the Messianic Expectation that I have now 
to deal ; and I want to make you understand at the out- 
set that the Messiah-idea, as such, probably did not 
hold quite all that importance in the minds of the Jew- 
ish people in those days that we are inclined to at- 
tribute to it. The coming of Jesus, to whom the name 
of the Messiah has been so extensively attached, has 
led us possibly to exaggerate the feeling of interest con- 
cerning that belief as it prevailed at the time when 
Jesus appeared. But it was one of the popular beliefs 
of the people at that time. There was an air of ex- 
pectancy. The feeling was abroad that the Deliverer 
was coming. 

At the outset I must also rather surprise you per- 
haps, by saying that of Jesus, as the Messiah, there is 
no intimation whatsoever anywhere in the Old Testa- 
ment. Neither prophet nor priest, neither the people nor 
the leaders of the people had ever dreamed of a suffer- 
ing Messiah. Such a thought apparently had never 
entered the heads of the Jewish people. There was 
no anticipation of a Jesus as a Messiah. It was of an- 
other kind of person altogether that the people of that 
day were thinking. And we see even in the gospels of 
the New Testament, how the disciples of Jesus them- 
selves began also to think of their Master as one who 
would fulfill the popular expectations and become a 
real prince, an earthly Deliverer; they, too, had no 
thought of a suffering Messiah. 


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117 


Have we any clew anywhere to these changes which 
had taken place in the minds of the people? Yes, I 
answer, we have. The clew is not to be found in the 
great prophets of Judaism, nor in the Bible as it existed 
when Jerusalem was restored. But if you had been 
living a hundred years ago and had bought a copy 
of the Bible in the English version, you would have 
found in the middle of it, just between the Old and the 
New Testaments, a number of books which might have 
been in fine print, but which are no longer there. Most 
of these books were written during that four hun- 
dred years in the Transition-Age leading up to the 
birth of Christianity. They go under the name of the 
“Apocrypha,” as you know. For some reason they 
were not looked upon as sacred or inspired quite to the 
same extent as the other books of the Bible, so that 
now they are omitted altogether. 

I look upon this as something of a misfortune, be- 
cause they would be like a key by which to under- 
stand the New Testament better. Some of these are 
books of history; and on the whole the history there 
is far more accurate than what you have in the other 
books of the Old Testament. Some are collections of 
wise sayings ; one of them is called “Ecclesiasticus,” 
and contains a great deal of the most profound wis- 
dom, as fine as anything in the Book of Proverbs. 
Then there are other collections of Psalms there, as 
well as other “Prophecies.” If you were to read this 
literature you would find a number of the connecting 
links between the Old and the New Testaments. It 
is in these books, for instance, that you come upon 
the whole doctrine about the resurrection of the dead, 
the immortality of the soul, a judgment day, a heaven 
and a hell. You see how these beliefs had been 
growing up and spreading abroad among the people 
after the new temple had been built and the Jewish 
Church had been established. 

In one of these books, if not in a number of them, 
you come upon a motive practically never appealed to 
by the great prophets of former times — the motive of 


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reward in a second life as a return for one’s righteous- 
ness in this life on earth. 

In the great prophets, immortality was for Israel, 
the people Israel, that is to say, the nation or the 
national life. But now the language was being applied 
to the individual Israelite. I read, for instance, in one 
of these books called the “Wisdom of Solomon,” writ- 
ten in this transitional epoch : 

“The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God and 
there shall no harm touch them. In the sight of the unwise 
they seemed to die; and their departure is taken for misery. 
But they are in peace. For though they be punished in the 
sight of man, yet is their hope ever of immortality. Having 
been a little chastised they shall be greatly rewarded.” 

Where had this belief come from? Even its germs 
are scarcely to be found in the teachings of the “Law” 
or the Older Prophets. The answer is pretty clear ; it 
came from the outside. 

Keep in mind that after the restoration of Jerusa- 
lem and the foundation of the Jewish Church, the 
people were subjects of a new empire, that of Persia; 
and they remained subject to this empire, in one way 
or another, down to the rise of Alexander the Great. 

You will recall what was the religion of the people 
of Persia — Mazdaism, or the religion of Zoroastar. 
Now, in the teachings of that religion, we find just 
these special elements which were wanting for the 
most part in the sacred books of the Jewish Church. 
In the teachings, for example, of the religion of that 
other empire, we come upon the great doctrine of 
antagonism between light and darkness, of good spirits 
and of evil spirits. It is there that we find the angel- 
ology, and there that we come upon the complete doc- 
trine of resurrection and immortality. It is there that 
we meet with a judgment day, a heaven and a hell. 
It is there that we find the angels divided into cohorts 
or armies, with their princes or leaders as soldiers 
and courtiers around a heavenly throne. 

Beyond almost any doubt, it was through that 
source that this belief in another life, in a heaven and 
a hell, in a judgment day and in an angelology, crept 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


119 


into Judaism. It came undoubtedly at first through 
the people, I fancy, rather than through the scholars 
or the priesthood. Hence it is that we find little of 
it in the psalms written at that time; hence it is that 
we discover a great school in Jerusalem, even at the 
time of Jesus, who, as conservatives, rejected all these 
new features, accepting no belief in a resurrection, a 
judgment day, a heaven or a hell. The scholars of 
Judea, with the priesthood, had been able to keep their 
belief in God clear and pure, untinctured with idola- 
try or with Polytheism. Yahweh, the God of Jere- 
miah, was still the God of Israel. But the plain people 
had asked for more, or had hungered for more; and 
they breathed it in from the atmosphere surrounding 
them, not with a thought of a radical change in the re- 
ligion to which they adhered, but as an additional fea- 
ture which made their religion more human and real 
to them. 

Of the belief in a Spirit of Evil we see traces faintly 
marked in the older teachings of the Bible. But it had 
been a subordinate element and not of much conse- 
quence. Now, in this transitional age what had been 
a minor feature, handed down possibly from a pre-his- 
toric spirit-worship, when all gods may have been 
looked upon as agencies of evil, this other phase had 
come to take prominence, ranking next in importance 
to the belief in the one God. Next in significance 
to Yahweh himself, in the minds of the people, came 
this belief in a mighty Spirit of Evil — Satan. The 
supernatural world had been made alive again for the 
peasants of Galilee and for the populace of Jerusalem. 
They had lost their plural-god, but they had got him 
back in another form, as you see. 

The belief in a clear, pure, transcendent monotheism 
must always be the belief of a few. The majority of 
men, I fancy, to the end of time will people the super- 
natural world with beings of many kinds, giving them 
names and attributes, and perhaps be more inclined to 
pay attention to them than to the one divine supreme 
Power over all. 


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I speak of this because it shows that when the new 
teachings were to arise in the new Christian era, there 
was something concrete in the minds of the people, to 
which they could appeal. In a sense the great prophets 
of old had been so aloof from that concrete phase 
which the mass of the people demanded, that they had 
never really won a controlling influence over the peo- 
ple. 

Most striking of all is a new kind of literature which 
developed during these centuries of which I am speak- 
ing. And it is in this essentially new form of literature 
that we find our cue, or starting point, to the great 
change which was to come with the appearance of 
Jesus. 

I told you that the men whom we call by the names 
of prophets in the Old Testament, had not been “pro- 
phets” in our sense of the word. Foretelling the fu- 
ture had been a very minor feature of their utterances. 
The great point of what they had done was in the line 
of ethical judgments, as I told you. In so far as they 
talked of the future, it was usually in only a general 
way as pointing out the doom awaiting wickedness, 
while holding out a hope for a glorified Jerusalem 
through a survival of the remnant of the righteous. 

But now the real “prophets” were to come; the 
teachers whose chief purpose was to foretell the fu- 
ture. I am thinking of the so-called Apocalypses which 
appeared in this transitional age. The authors of these 
writings gave just what the people wanted. They 
did not denounce, they did not hold threats of judg- 
ment over Israel; but they held out definite promises 
of what was going to take place within a definite time. 
They told it in visions, and these visions passed into the 
minds of the populace in a way that the teachings of 
the great prophets had never done. 

Our cue to the great new age which was coming, lies 
in this apocalyptic literature. Strangely enough, just 
one of these books crept into the sacred canon of 
Scripture. Why this happened we cannot say. It is 
not really in keeping with most of the Old Testament, 
and stands by itself in our Scriptures. 


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121 


I speak of this because we have assurance that at 
about the time of the Christian era, among the mass 
of the people, it was about the most popular book in 
the Bible. And yet, oddly enough, it was the last one 
to have been written. Around the Lake of Galilee 
and in the city of Jerusalem the visions of this book 
were talked of and dwelt upon as naught else in the 
Sacred Scriptures. 

It may seem a strange statement, when I assert that 
the popular beliefs of the mass of the people through- 
out Christendom to-day come more from this one 
short book, the last to have been written, than from 
all the other books of the Old Testament taken to- 
gether. And yet to-day it is largely a book which is 
handed over to the children. It ranks, to a cetain ex- 
tent, with the Book of Jonah. If I asked you offhand 
what comes up to your mind as a picture from your 
childhood recollections of the Bible next to the story 
of Jonah, you would probably say, “Why, it is Daniel 
in the lions’ den.” 

You know, of course, that it is of the book of “Dan- 
iel” that I am speaking. Now, in this book you see the 
age of transition plainly written there. The cue is 
before us. In this book we have the doctrine of the 
resurrection of the dead, the belief in immortality, the 
judgment day and the scheme of angelology. It is 
there that we read of angels and archangels, and it is 
there that we come upon that singular phrase which 
is to mean so much, “The Son of Man.” It is a book 
of prophecy and nothing else, designed to foretell the 
future and to announce what was to come. 

In it we see the Messianic Expectations much fur- 
ther advanced than we find them in the older prophets. 
In fact, it is a new and changed world into which we 
are introduced when we come upon this Book of Dan- 
iel. It should have gone with the Apocrypha and not 
have ranked with the grand old prophets of Israel. 
You remember the dreams and visions which you find 
there and of the interpretations put upon them. The 
author revels in mystical numbers; and the book has 
been, and is to-day, a perfect gold mine for cranks of 


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all shapes and kinds. They have turned its words in- 
side out, and have found endless meanings in them; 
they love this book as they love nothing else in the 
whole Bible. I know not how many new sects may 
have arisen because of the fanciful interpretations put 
upon the mystical prophecies of Daniel. 

The author writes as if living in the time of the 
Exile at Babylon, whereas, as we know practically 
for a certainty, the book was written hundreds of 
years after the Exile — probably about 160 years be- 
fore the Christian era. 

Along with this Book of Daniel should go another 
which probably had even greater influence on the 
masses of the people of the age preceding the coming 
of Jesus, but which for some reason was never taken 
into the canon of Sacred Scripture. It goes under the 
name of “The Blessing of Enoch.” As for this book 
it is a marvel to the curious and well worth perusal 
if one has the time for such reading. It “out-Daniels 
Daniel,” and gives visions galore. It is something of a 
pity that this book has not been preserved in our Bible, 
so that we might have the connecting links between the 
Old and the New Testament all before us. We should 
then understand better what the masses of the people 
were thinking about at the time of the Christian era; 
because we must remember that Jesus spoke to the peo- 
ple and had little influence over the priesthood or the 
philosophers in Judea or Jerusalem. Only, therefore, 
as we understand what the people were thinking about 
at that time, can we understand Jesus and the rise of 
Christianity. 

We must remember that it is possible for persons 
theoretically to take a whole literature, as all alike 
sacred, thinking of it all as the inspired word of God. 
But when you get right down into the hearts of such 
persons, you will usually find that only about a quarter 
of that whole literature appeals to them. The rest 
they accept theoretically, but make little use of. This 
is true to-day of Christendom with regard to the Bi- 
ble, including the New Testament. And it was true 
at the time of the Christian era in regard to the Bible 


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123 


existing then, the Old Testament. The attention of 
the masses of the people at that time, who theoretically 
believed in the whole of the Sacred Scriptures, was 
upon one very small portion of these Scriptures. 

By turning back to the one Apocalypse of that age 
which is at hand, that of Daniel, I need scarcely more 
than mention it in order to revive it in your memories. 
You recollect the vision of the statue of which Nebu- 
chadnezzar dreamed — the head of fine gold, the breast 
and arms of silver, the thighs of brass, the legs of 
iron and the feet part of iron and part of clay. You 
remember, too, the explanation of that famous hand- 
writing on the wall and the interpretation, “Thou art 
weighed in the balance and found wanting.” You will 
recall the vision of the “Beasts” and of the “Ancient 
of Days” whose garment was white as snow. And you 
remember the language of the prophet as he says : 

“I saw in the night visions, and behold there came with the 
clouds of heaven one like unto a son of man, and he came 
even to the ancient of days, and they brought him near before 
him. And there was given him dominion and glory and a 
kingdom that all the peoples, nations and languages should 
serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which 
shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be 
destroyed.” 

We come upon these mystical numbers where the 
prophet says : 

“Seventy weeks are decreed upon thy people and upon thy 
holy city, to finish transgression and to make an end of sins 
and to make reconciliation for iniquity and to bring in ever- 
lasting righteousness and to seal up vision and prophecy and 
to anoint the most holy. Know therefore, and discern that 
from the going forth of the commandment to restore and 
build Jerusalem unto the Anointed One — the Prince — shall be 
seven weeks ; and three score and two weeks it shall be built 
again, with street and moat even in troublous times.” 

The book closes, you remember, with a suggestion 
of a judgment day: 

“At that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which 
standeth for the children of thy people ; and there shall be a 
time of trouble such as there never was since there was a na- 
tion, even to that same time ; and at that time thy people shall 


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be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book. 
And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall 
awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and ever- 
lasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the 
brightness of the firmament ; and they that turn many to right- 
eousness as the stars forever and ever.” 

Now it may, or may not surprise you to learn that 
this Book of Daniel had a great deal more to do with 
the Messianic Expectation as it existed at the time of 
the Christian era, than all the rest of the Bible taken 
together.* Along with it, of course, should be classed 
that other book, “The Blessing of Enoch.” In point 
of fact, a whole literature was extant at the time, 
which probably had much more influence on the minds 
of the people, than the sacred books of the priesthood 
or the church. It was then perhaps even as now; 
scholars and the people may nominally have the same 
religion, but their interpretation of it will be quite 
different and make it seem like two religions. 

I am coming, you see, to the subject which interests 
us most in that age, the rise of the Messianic Ex- 
pectation. How did it come? You will say, perhaps, 
that the Old Testament is full of it. Strangely enough, 
the Jewish Rabbis at the time of the Christian era 
said the same thing. There is a tradition of one of 
these Rabbis having said that: “The prophets pro- 
phesy of nothing else save the Messiah.” 

Yet I must assert that if it were not for the Book 
of Daniel, we should scarcely have a hint as to the rise 
of the Messianic Expectation, at the time of the birth 
of Jesus in Judea. The great point to bear in mind, 
is just this: Among the older prophets, the great 
prophets of Israel, the Messianic Expectation was not 
so much with regard to a person, as with regard 
to the people of Israel themselves. What they talked 
of and dreamed of, and looked forward to, and pointed 
out to the people, was the new Jerusalem which was to 
come. What they had in mind, was the future king- 
dom of God on earth, and only incidentally did they talk 


*Other scholars, however, are inclined to question whether 
the Book of Daniel refers so decidedly to a personal Messiah. 


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125 


of the one who was to bring that kingdom about, or 
of the personal Deliverer. In so far as they talked of 
the Anointed One, the Messiah, who was to accom- 
plish this, sometimes they were speaking of an outside 
king like Cyrus of Persia, and not an Israelite at all, 
not necessarily a saintly hero of God, but simply an in- 
dividual whose efforts should work in this direction 
through the guidance of Providence. It was of the 
kingdom itself that the old prophets were talking. 
I venture to say that we should more nearly express 
the feeling of the prophets if we said that in their 
thought, the children of Israel themselves were to be 
the Messiah, rather than any one special anointed hero 
of God. 

The older Messianic Expectation, therefore, was 
radically different in many ways in its spirit from the 
Messianic Expectation of the Christian era. In that 
passage which I read to you from the Second Isaiah 
there is no reference to a personal Messiah, and prob- 
ably no reference to such a person in any of his writ- 
ings. Down to the time of the establishment of the 
Jewish Church in the year 444 B. C., the dominant 
note of the Messianic Expectation had been of this 
other kind. The enthusiasm about the coming of a 
personal Messiah has to be explained through what 
took place during that interval of which I am now 
speaking. The cue to it, as I have said, is in that 
Apocalyptic literature, an example of which we find in 
the Book of Daniel. 

At the same time, there is the fact before us, that 
even the scholars of Jerusalem at the time of the 
coming of Jesus, had begun to see throughout the Sa- 
cred Scriptures the prophecy of this Anointed One who 
was to come as the Redeemer or Deliverer. How 
shall we explain it? It lies perhaps in one fact I have 
not yet mentioned to you. In the last century before 
the Christian era, Hebrew had practically become a 
dead language. How vital this change was, we can 
only vaguely appreciate. Down to the time of 444 
B. C. the people who founded the restored Jerusalem 
and were the Israelites of that day, on the whole spoke 


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the language of the old prophets, the speech of Amos 
and Hosea, of Isaiah and Jeremiah. The plain, homely, 
matter-of-fact, direct utterances of these prophets 
could mean just what the words said to the people 
who heard them at that time. But during these few 
hundred years a new language had spread abroad 
among the people ; and at the time of the Christian era 
the language of the country was Aramaic, and this 
was the language of Jesus. 

The moment a language becomes dead, it takes on a 
wholly new character; it may lose its simplicity and 
directness, and admit an element of mysticism which 
was quite foreign to it at other times. Words them- 
selves become sacred, and peculiar meanings are at- 
tributed to them. Hence it is that we can understand 
why, at the time of the Christian era, the priesthood 
or the scholars of Israel should have lost much of the 
clear meaning of their own sacred scriptures. Hence it 
was that when once this expectation of a personal 
Messiah had fully taken shape and even won its way 
among the priesthood or scholars, it was not such a 
difficult matter for them to go back to their writings 
and put mystical interpretations upon the sentences or 
words all the way through, discovering by this means 
constant references to such a personal Messiah, when 
the references were not there at all, or only in a 
slight or vague degree. 

Keep in mind the fact, as I have said, that each 
prophet who had promised hope for the future, had 
thought of that hope as soon to be realized. And we 
see now that it had not been fully realized. The new 
Jerusalem, as they dreamed of it, had not yet come, 
and hundreds of years had gone by. It was not 
strange that the Messianic Expectation should have 
taken another turn. 

But the question of all questions arises : What 
brought the Apocalyptic literature into existence ? Why 
had it taken such a vital hold on the people? Only in 
answering this question can we explain the new ideas 
concerning the Messianic Expectation. 


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127 


It all turns around an epoch in the history of Je- 
rusalem, or of the people of Israel, of which we have 
no mention whatever, so far as I know, in our Bible. 
In one sense, we might say, the critical epoch in the 
history of Judaism was not in the day of the “Judges” 
after the death of Moses when the Canaanites threat- 
ened to exterminate the Israelites who had wandered 
over into Palestine. It was not even in the days of the 
kingdom, when the paganism of the Canaanites 
threatened to conquer the worship of Yahweh, the God 
of Israel. It was not altogether in the overthrow of 
Jerusalem and the captivity of the Israelites in Baby- 
lon. Nor was it after the restoration of Jerusalem 
and the contact of Judaism with the other religion of 
Persia, which seemed ready to fuse with it, if not com- 
pletely to alter its character. No, the real menace to 
Judaism came as an influence from the West, from 
a country which had been in a state of barbarism al- 
most, at the time when the great prophets were speak- 
ing. I am thinking, of course, of Greece and of Attic 
culture. 

This “Attic culture” was the most insidious foe 
which had ever arisen to the religions of the ancient 
world. What gave it such a disintegrating power we 
can only dimly understand. It conquered the relig- 
ion of Rome and the educated people of Rome after 
the armies of Rome had conquered Greece. It en- 
camped in Egypt, became domesticated there, and 
overthrew the oldest religion in the world, a religion 
which had withstood all outside foes for upward of 
nearly 2,000 years. Why is it that Greek culture did 
not cause Judaism to disintegrate and go to pieces? 
It did make the effort. Naught of this, to be sure, 
is to be found clearly described in the Bible. One 
of the greatest battles of history was to be fought at 
this time, far more eventful in its way than the battles 
fought by the C’sesars, at least so far as the future 
of religious thought was concerned. It was to be a 
battle between two spiritual forces. 

The reason, humanly speaking, why Judaism did 
not go under to Greek culture, was because of the 


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fact that, unlike the methods pursued elsewhere by 
the new Greek empire established in the East after 
the death of Alexander the Great, the man who had 
control over Palestine undertook to wipe out the re- 
ligion there by violence. It was that effort which 
saved Judaism. Had the course of events been left 
to work out their own consequences in Palestine, as 
in Rome or Egypt, that insidious foe of the old re- 
ligions of the earlier world might have even killed 
Judaism. 

In that other literature I have spoken of, which used 
to be bound up with the Bible and went under the 
name of the Apocrypha, there are two books of his- 
tory; and in these boooks we find our cue. Without 
them we should have no explanation of what went on 
in that eventful time there. But in the books of the 
“Maccabees’" we learn how for the first time since the 
overthrow of Jerusalem in 586, a real kingdom was es- 
tablished there, an independent kingdom. It lasted but 
for a few months only. The leaders had not set out 
with the idea of establishing a new kingdom. But 
before they arose there had been woe in the land. As 
we read in the first chapter of the First Book of the 
Maccabees. 

“There was great mourning in Israel in every place where 
they were; so that the princes and elders mourned, the vir- 
gins and young men were made feeble, and the beauty of wo- 
man was changed ; every bridegroom took up lamentation, and 
she that sat in the marriage chamber was in heaviness. The 
land also was moved for the inhabitants thereof and all the 
house of Jacob was covered with confusion.” 

And what was all this about? Why this sorrow in 
the new Jerusalem? The explanation is contained in 
the same chapter, where we are told : 

“King Antiochus wrote to his whole kingdom that all should 
be one people and every one should leave his laws. So all the 
heathen agreed according to the commandment of the king. 
The king had sent letters by messengers unto Jerusalem and 
the seats of Judah that they should follow the strange laws 
of the land, and forbid burnt offerings and sacrifices and drink 
offerings in the temple ; and that they should profane the Sab- 
bath and festival days; and pollute the sanctuary and holy 


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people ; sacrifice swine’s flesh and unclean beasts ; to the end 
they might forget the law and change all the ordinances. And 
whosoever would not do according to the commandment of the 
king, he should die.” 

It was an extraordinary policy and the worst one 
which the king could have tried. The old story re- 
peated itself: Persecution gave still stronger life to 
the religion of the people. Once more the sifting 
process was carried out by which only the loyal were 
to survive in the end and perpetuate the Judaism of 
old. The people died by the thousands ; a whole army 
of them allowed themselves to be slaughtered without 
raising a blow in their own defense, because they had 
been attacked on the Sabbath day. I have not time to 
tell you the story, how a venerable priest had said : 

“Yet will I and my sons and my brethren walk in the cov- 
enant of our fathers. God forbid that we should forsake the 
law and the ordinances. We will not hearken to the king’s 
words, to go from our religion either on the right hand or the 
left.” 

And as he said these words, you remember, there 
came a Jew who had not the courage to refuse and 
was about to offer sacrifice to the heathen god. And 
the venerable priest stepped forth and slew the man 
and slew the king’s officer. Then he and his sons 
fled to the mountains and organized an army of re- 
sistance. We know of the battles they fought, of the 
victories they won. We know of the slaughter which 
took place, of the kingdom which was temporarily 
set up under Judas Maccabeus. And we know how 
he was finally overthrown and the people were con- 
quered. But they were only conquered by a con- 
cession on the part of the conqueror that they should 
be left alone in their religion. Judaism had won. The 
attack made upon it had put it in open conflict with 
Greek culture, Greek influences, Greek philosophy. 
Persecution had saved it from its most dangerous foe. 

I tell you this story because we have the best evi- 
dence that it was just about this time when the new 
Apocalyptic literature began to appear. In that awful 
struggle of the people to save their religion and be 


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true to the ordinances of their law, the Messianic Ex- 
pectation underwent a change. The cry went up now 
for a personal Deliverer, for the Anointed One who 
should come. They had had the promise of the glori- 
fied Jerusalem from the early prophets, and the promise 
had not yet been realized. It looked now as if Jeru- 
salem itself would go down forever and not appear 
again in any form, much less as a glorified Jerusalem. 
Just at the time of the deepest gloom there arose the 
strongest conviction, not only that a new Deliverer 
would come and a new Jerusalem would arise, but that 
they, the people of Israel, were to become the rulers 
over the whole earth. It seems like a wild dream ; but 
you must remember that it was in the old days. And 
it is in just such a crisis that people will dream dreams ; 
it may be at the very stage when their cause is the 
lowest down that they have the wildest hopes of what 
is to come. At last the Messianic Expectations of a 
kingdom of God fused with the expectation of a per- 
sonal Deliverer, of a Messiah, who was to bring that 
kingdom about. 

The new Jerusalem as holding dominion over the 
whole world, did not come. They lost their fight for 
freedom and independence, but they won their freedom 
for their religion. Yet the new dreams had now found 
their way into the hearts of the people. The visions of 
“Daniel” spread far and wide. 

Then came a new danger to the children of Israel. 
They had been the victims of the wrath of the king 
of Babylon; they had been the subjects of the great 
Persian empire; they had been under the yoke of the 
new Greek empire set up by Alexander the Great. 
Now at last they were to fall under the iron hand 
of Roman despotism. Before the armies of Rome none 
of the nations could stand up and hold their own. A 
hundred years had gone by since Daniel had written 
of his visions. The cause of Israel had reached its 
lowest ebb, one might say, in the last half century 
before the Christian era. The kingdom of God had 
not come; the new Jerusalem had not appeared; the 
Deliverer was not yet at hand. 


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131 


But in the presence of the Roman soldiers in Gali- 
lee, and in the streets of Jerusalem, when the peo- 
ple were paying their tribute to Caesar, at the time 
when they were at their lowest stage of degraded 
subjection to the Gentile, just at that time the dream 
of a coming Messiah may have been the strongest. 
It was talked of in the households of Galilee and 
among the sages at Jerusalem. We are told, for in- 
stance, from outside sources, how at this very time the 
belief had taken firm hold among the people that they 
were going to have dominion over the whole earth. 
It was wild and chimerical, we say. Yet not so 
strange! The worse the conditions, the wilder the 
dream — that has been often the fact in history. 

The day and the hour had not yet been definitely 
fixed upon in Judea, but the feeling was growing that 
the time was nigh at hand. 

And at that very time, down in the wilderness of Ju- 
dea, by the river of Jordan, a new leader appeared. It 
was a strange figure, uncouth and wild in aspect, “with 
his raiment of camel’s hair and a leathern girdle about 
his loins, and his meat was locusts and wild honey.” 
And from him went up the cry: “Repent ye, for the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand.” It was “the voice 
of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way 
of the Lord ; make his paths straight.” 

In this language of John the Baptist we see the tone 
of a new prophecy. The line of the great prophets of 
Israel had not died out. Once more the old spirit of 
Isaiah and Jeremiah was to flame out and shake the 
world ; yes, shake it to its foundations. The “forerun- 
ner” of Jesus had come. Of the new prophecy of 
Israel I shall speak in the next lecture. 


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JESUS AND THE BACKGROUND OF 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 


Of all the pictures from the Old Masters giving us 
their ideals or conceptions of the face of Jesus, one of 
them always stands out to me before all others, as the 
one which is truest to the portraiture of Jesus in the 
New Testament. You have all seen photographs of 
this picture, and some of you have seen the original 
itself over in Europe. It is not among the list of 
those paintings giving us Jesus at the time of his sor- 
row and passion, in the hour of his trial or crucifixion. 
There is no agony in the face of which I am thinking. 
The lines are clear and serene. It is a face calm and 
undisturbed by any feelings save those of a universal 
kind. It gives us the core of the very being of the 
man. 

The effect is produced in part by contrast. What we 
have is two faces. The one stands for the world — 
the outside, the physical, the animal in human nature, 
the lower self all by itself. And the other is the spirit- 
ual face — all soul, as if you saw the inside from the 
outside. 

I am sure you know of what picture I am thinking. 
It is supposed to record the scene which is looked 
upon as one of the most surely historic in the whole 
Bible. The man of the animal type is looking into the 
eye of Jesus, while he holds a coin in his hand, and is 
asking the Master, “Shall we render tribute to Caesar?” 
And Jesus, looking him in the eye, gives him the well- 
known answer. 

Humanly speaking, Jesus was the last of the pro- 
phets, and was a lineal descendant of the prophecy of 
Israel. The revolution which took place occurred after 
his death and not before. The reason why there was 
a revolution rather than a steady, onward move- 
ment lay not so much in the teachings of Jesus himself, 


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133 


perhaps, as in the conditions of the age to which they 
were presented. 

Why there came a revolution, a final split in Jeru- 
salem after the death of Jesus, I shall try to explain 
in a few words, in what I shall have to say to-day, al- 
ways leaving it for your choice to assume the addi- 
tional explanation of theological or supernatural causes 
as being at work at the same time. 

We said that the next great date in the history of 
the Bible was the year 4 B. C., connected with the 
birth of Jesus. Out of that event and that life grew 
up the last portion of the Bible, which we call the New 
Testament. The first part of this second portion of 
the Bible deals with the life and teachings of Jesus. 
You open your New Testament and you will find four 
short books there, called “Gospels.” 

What you have in each case is a memoir. The ac- 
counts repeat each other, in many instances giving 
the same words, the same anecdotes. But in most 
cases there are additional features contained in one 
book and not found in the others. Not only that, but 
the sayings of Jesus vary more or less; slight changes 
in phraseology or additional clauses are to be found 
there. For instance, to give a slight illustration: 

In the gospel “according to St. Luke,” you find 
the words, “Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the king- 
dom of God.” It is contained in a collection of say- 
ings in the part of one chapter. You turn back to 
the gospel “according to St. Matthew,” and you will 
find this same saying as one of the “beatitudes” in the 
Sermon on the Mount. Blut it reads, “Blessed are the 
poor in spirit , for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 
Such minor variations are evident all the way through 
these memoirs, pointing, however, to an original group 
of sayings which undoubtedly came from the lips of 
Jesus. 

Of these four “Gospels,” as they are called, three of 
them are looked upon as very much alike in character, 
in giving the same general idea of Jesus; while the 
fourth, as you know, presents another picture — not 
necessarily contradictory to that of the other three, 


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but far different in many ways. It would seem to 
present a phase of Jesus which was not in the minds of 
the other writers, or a phase in which they personally 
took less interest, and to which, therefore, they paid 
little or no attention. In the fourth gospel, for in- 
stance, there is a great deal of emphasis laid on his own 
personality in the language attributed to Jesus. There 
is a far more vivid consciousness assumed to be put 
forward by him with regard to the importance of his 
own leadership, and the necessity for his disciples of 
constantly thinking of him as the leader and taking 
him as a guide. In the other gospels, the guidance is 
more unconscious; whereas in the fourth gospel it is 
open and avowed. In the conception of this fourth 
writer the master is aware of his overwhelming supe- 
riority, spiritually and otherwise, even to his disciples, 
and feels the need of impressing the fact of this super- 
riority upon them. 

At this point I must remind you that I cannot give 
you quite the same general unanimity of opinion con- 
cerning the New Testament writings, which I might 
give you concerning the writings in the Old Testa- 
ment. Feeling runs high when we come to deal with 
the last portions of the Bible; and the same scholars 
who may welcome all that I have said with reference 
to the Old Testament may, in certain instances, refuse 
to accept this method of dealing when we come to 
study the New Testament. Caution at this point is 
much greater. Yet even here you can see forming a 
certain growing consensus of opinion among those who 
take the historical attitude at all. And I shall keep to 
my assertion that every statement I make could find 
justification in writers from a number of the orthodox 
clergy, although they would be fewer in number than 
those who would accept the statements I have made 
concerning the Old Testament. 

The two gospels, for instance, which had been most 
often attributed to disciples of Jesus, the first and the 
last, Matthew and John, are not now regarded as di- 
rectly having been written by those disciples them- 
selves. As for the Apostle Matthew, it is very largely 


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135 


asserted by the very best authorities, that what he left 
as a writing was a collection of the sayings of Jesus. 
This standpoint is also justified by tradition, because 
from the earliest times we find reference to the well- 
known “Logia” or “sayings” of Matthew; and the 
supposition is that the writer of the first gospel made 
large use of these sayings, and hence his book came 
gradually to pass under the name of the Apostle Mat- 
thew. The second and third writers, Mark and Luke, 
are not supposed to have seen Jesus, but to have made 
collections of what they had heard from others. 

In studying these memoirs, what you would have is a 
sketch, and a sketch only — nowhere a finished pic- 
ture. What you find would be usually mere lines, 
only here and there a touch of color, with certain por- 
tions scarcely developed at all, where there is not even 
a single line to help us, or give us a clue. 

You know, for instance, that when a biography is 
written nowadays, the writer goes to work most care- 
fully to study up the boyhood and youth and early 
manhood of the person whose life he has to tell. He 
sees what a vital importance there is in tracing up the 
early growth of mind and heart; observing the sur- 
roundings, the family life, even the characteristics of 
the father and mother. A biography to-day would 
be almost worthless which did not give us a most care- 
ful picture of such surroundings. Without these de- 
tails we should not look upon it as a biography at all. 
It would be only a memoir. 

Now, as you are aware, we have in these sketches of 
the life of Jesus in the New Testament, only one short 
anecdote concerning him from the second year of his 
life down to the time when he was thirty years of age. 
And the one anecdote of which I speak, mentioning 
Jesus incidentally when he was twelve years old, is to 
be found in only one of these memoirs. 

Bear in mind, for instance, that the one of these 
accounts looked upon as the oldest, the Gospel ac- 
cording to St. Mark, has not a word to say with re- 
gard even to the birth of Jesus. It begins its account 
with the Teacher just setting out on his mission, when 


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we assume he was about thirty years of age. And 
this is also true of the fourth and striking gospel, 
where you have the sketch only of the man, with not 
even any hint of his early life at all. 

As you look over these memoirs you will see that 
the writers scarcely make a pretense of giving a con- 
secutive account even of the public life of Jesus during 
the three years of his ministry. You can see most 
plainly that each one is simply putting down the vari- 
ous anecdotes which had come to him, or stories he 
had heard of, or precepts which had been reported to 
him as having been spoken by Jesus. You may run 
on for a number of pages with a certain degree of 
order; then the connection will break off entirely, as 
the narrator starts in with some other phase he wishes 
to introduce, or some other teachings which he de- 
sires to record. Only of the last few days in the life 
of Jesus, or the last few weeks, have we any continu- 
ous account in any of these memoirs. 

All four of the gospels together make up only about 
eighty-two pages of the Bible, and if you were to elimi- 
nate all repetitions you would practically have the 
whole of the sketch contained within about twenty-five 
or thirty pages — and this of the Founder of Christi- 
anity, the leader of the greatest religious revolution 
which ever took place in the world’s history. 

Whether this is to be regretted is, at least, a de- 
batable point. It has left room for the idealizing ten- 
dency of the human consciousness; and if a Provi- 
dence planned the writing of the Scriptures and the 
whole scheme of the Bible, I am not sure that such a 
Providence could have used a better method than that 
of leaving only a sketch, and having the picture filled 
out little by little through the responses which the 
heart of man himself has made to the hints or sugges- 
tons which the “lines” awaken. 

Bear in mind, further, that a biography is never a 
true biography, that a picture is never a true picture, in 
the sense of being complete. There is no use in ever 
expecting to have a complete picture or an absolutely 
accurate picture of any life, if that life has amounted to 


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137 


anything. I am doubtful whether it would have been 
of any service to human history, therefore, if there had 
been a far more complete picture given of this Last of 
the Prophets. It remained for the genius in the great 
heart of man to go on completing it from age to age. 
St. Augustine added something to it ; Thomas a’ 
Kernpis put more into it. The men who designed the 
great cathedral-architecture of the old world, they put 
a great deal into it. And more came from Michael 
Angelo and Raphael, the old masters of Europe. Mar- 
tin Luther added something to it, and so, also, have the 
scholars of the nineteenth century. And so the sketch 
has gone on and on, being further developed all the 
while, and those who choose to believe that Providence 
or a God is speaking there in that life, can still hold to 
the belief that it was the method of Providence that the 
sketch should be filled out in just this way. 

I emphasize this point because it is so important. 
If a man were to come from the planet Mars and to 
study human speech here on earth, and were first to 
read the memoirs in the New Testament and then sud- 
denly to step over eighteen centuries of time and look 
at the conceptions of Christianity at the close of the 
nineteenth century, it might be all utterly incompre- 
hensible to him. He could say, and say truly, “But 
what you give me now, I do not find in these me- 
moirs. ” The only answer to offer him would be, “Yes, 
but the memoirs are a sketch, and the human heart has 
been filling out the sketch during the succeeding 
ages.” 

It is not my purpose to go into the subject of the his- 
toric trustworthiness of the gospels. That is a side 
phase of my problem. We have the best of evidence 
that these memoirs developed somewhat gradually, like 
the historic records of the Old Testament. Only, the 
development in this case was much more rapid, so that 
while the historic documents of the Old Testament 
were five or six hundred years in taking their shape, 
we have pretty good reason for thinking that these 
memoirs were in existence within about a hundred 
years after the death of Jesus. They did not stop 


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growing even then. Additions must have crept into 
them with changes here and there, for four hundred 
years after. We are not sure, for instance, that we 
have the Pentateuch exactly as it was put forward by 
Ezra in the year 444 B. C. It went on growing or be- 
ing changed for two or three hundred years, but not to 
a very large extent. So in these memoirs, additions 
must have been made, and we have the open acknowl- 
edgment of this fact in the last revisions of the English 
Bible, where you will find, for instance, one well- 
known and very striking story in the Gospel of John, 
which has been placed in brackets in the revised ver- 
sion. Why? Because it was not found in that famous 
text I told you about, discovered at Mount Sinai in the 
middle of the 19th century ; a text which is looked upon 
as having come from the time four or five hundred 
years after Christ. Hence even then, and from that 
time on, a tendency prevailed for incorporating new 
portions, or making slight interpolations in the text. 

The same is true with regard to the earliest gospel 
of the four, that of “Mark.” In your revised version, 
for instance, you will observe that the eleven verses at 
the end of that gospel are separated by a space from 
the rest, with the explanation in the margin, that these 
verses were not found in the two oldest Greek manu- 
scripts, which includes the one manuscript I have just 
mentioned. 

So it is, for instance, in the well-known Lord’s 
Prayer. In your childhood, as well as mine, I suppose 
you were accustomed to reciting the close of it as you 
found it in the Sermon on the Mount in your English 
Bible, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the 
glory forever.” You turn to the “revised version” 
issued by the English church, and these words are not 
there at all, not even with brackets. The revisers 
simply had to leave them out. 

Yet all these are not such radical changes; for the 
most part, as I say, these memoirs as we have them 
now, had practically come into existence by about the 
end of the first century of the Christian era. 


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139 


The more one studies the gospels, or these memoirs, 
just by themselves, the more one is inclined to feel 
that what Jesus inaugurated was a spiritual movement 
or tendency, rather than any new philosophy or new 
metaphysics. You can feel a certain element of unity 
in these memoirs, even where you cannot write it 
down in language. The basis of a creed as such is not 
there. I am inclined to doubt, if we had had only 
these memoirs from the New Testament whether there 
would have ever arisen any creed for Christianity. 

You may ask: What do we find that is distinctively 
new in the teachings in these memoirs? I must an- 
swer: Not a great deal. This will appear strange, per- 
haps startling, to some of you. If there was prac- 
tically little that was new in the teachings, how did 
there come about a revolution through the influence of 
Jesus? 

Those who have studied the history of religion will 
be able to answer the question for themselves. New 
philosophical movements start from a certain number 
of new teachings in philosophy. But new religious 
movements spring more from the element of person- 
ality. It is the man who starts the religious move- 
ment. It comes from his whole soul and being, rather 
than from just his intellectual side. 

As for the teachings themselves, in these memoirs, 
it would be possible to assign them quite largely to 
their respective sources. The famous golden rule had 
already been spoken by one of the Jews, by the name 
of Hillel; and it exists, as you know, in its negative 
form in the ancient teachings of the Chinese sage, 
Confucius. The pictures of the judgment day are 
largely drawn from previous apocalyptic sources in 
Jewish literature. And a good deal of the spirit of 
the new movement came straight from the old Hebrew 
precepts. Some of the teachings can be traced to 
sources in Greek literature. 

Then what is left for Jesus himself? you may ask, 
even as you asked with regard to Moses. I answer 
once more: Go study religious history. If all the 
various elements are there out of which a new religious 


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movement may be inaugurated, why does the move- 
ment not always come? The situation may be ready, 
yet the movement may not come at all. If every sin- 
gle thought uttered by Jesus could have been found 
in the teachings circulating in Palestine at the time of 
the Christian era, and if Jesus himself had not come, 
would there have been such a revolution as I speak of ? 
Not by any manner of means ! 

No, there was the subtle influence of personality. 
You cannot explain this ; you can only call it by name. 
Teachings of many kinds may be floating round in- 
definitely among a people but they only become one 
teaching, one tendency or one spirit, when they fuse 
into a unit in one living soul. 

Even if we only have a faint sketch of a man’s life 
and thought in these memoirs or gospels, by the laws 
of history we should know that an extraordinary per- 
sonality had been there. The mighty prophetic move- 
ment of the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries before 
the Christian era had not been an impersonal move- 
ment, an uprising of abstract thought surging through 
the masses of the people. No, it was the men whom 
we call the prophets, through whom that movement 
came. It developed out of a few individual souls. 

This much we should know, therefore, by the laws 
of history, that a rare, unique personality lived at the 
time of the Christian era, through whom the thoughts 
and teachings afloat in Palestine at the time fused into 
a new religion. 

It rests for me now in a few words, if I can, to de- 
scribe this movement in relation to the conditions of 
the time. You will then he able to see why it was that 
a revolution came about through the new tendency in- 
augurated by Jesus, and why it was not just simply an 
advance movement within Judaism itself. 

I have told you that when the exiles returned from 
Babylon they brought with them a definite religion, 
the religion of Judaism; and along with it a canon of 
Scripture including the Ten Commandments, and made 
up chiefly of what we term “The Pentateuch.” In the 


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141 


spirit of that religion they restored Jerusalem and 
founded the Jewish Church. 

Now it must be borne in mind that a religion like 
Judaism has a number of phases. But as time goes 
on, all the phases of a religion do not remain in equal 
importance. Inevitably one or more of them outstrip 
the others and take supersedence in the hearts of the 
people, or in the attention of the teachers of the people. 

Whether anyone could have foretold at that time 
just what phases of Judaism would have come into 
prominence a few centuries after, I very much doubt. 
You may anticipate the movements of the planets, but 
it is hard to anticipate what is going to take place in 
the spiritual life of a people. Now in the Judaism 
brought back after the exile, there was the spirit of 
the old prophecy, with its exalted conception of the 
true worship of Jehovah through conduct and life, 
through gentleness of spirit, through love and faithful- 
ness to the duties of life, with a clinging to a certain one 
only, supreme God as a “God of Israel.” Then, again, 
there was a second phase which had been touched 
upon by the prophets, but not made so much of by 
them. It was the importance to be laid by the people 
upon their separateness or exclusiveness, as a race. 

On the other side was a third phase, according to 
which a form of ritual worship of Yahweh was to be 
established. The people might not worship their God 
by means of an image, but they were to show their de- 
votion by carrying out certain forms, keeping cer- 
tain laws, making offerings or sacrifices. In the Deca- 
logue, as you are aware, there is only one of the ten 
commandments which has reference to that kind of 
worship. It is found in the fourth commandment with 
regard to keeping the Sabbath Day holy. 

These were the three phases of the older Judaism. 
The sublime monotheism of the prophets with the eth- 
ical conception of what true worship of God consisted 
in ; the standpoint of separateness or exclusiveness for 
the people of Israel ; and in the third place a code of 
ritual, according to which the people were to worship 
God. Which of the phases was to become predomi- 


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nant? You know which one really triumphed. Had it 
been the phase inaugurated by the prophets, there 
would have been no special occasion for the appearance 
of Jesus. But bear in mind, as I have told you, that 
the first code of scripture in the year 444 B. C. did not 
even include the teachings of the prophets; it con- 
sisted mainly of the historic books with the ritualistic 
code of law. The first thing that the new leaders 
did was to set up the standpoint of exclusiveness. 

They demanded that the people should put away 
even their wives, if their wives were not Hebrews. It 
was a severe test to be applied. Some of the people 
yielded; others refused; and so it happened that the 
leaders who refused went off and founded a separate 
kingdom, and hence came “Samaria.” But by that 
step, the principle of exclusiveness became supreme 
in the Jewish Church. And I remind you again that, 
humanly speaking, if this principle had not been es- 
tablished, perhaps the ethical monotheism would have 
perished. Even the prophets had taught it and it was 
essential at that time. The trouble is that a measure 
once started and established, with a definite purpose 
in view, may become so fixed and rigid that when the 
purpose has been accomplished, you cannot change the 
measure. Now it so happened that the more estab- 
lished the ethical monotheism became and the less was 
the absolute need of a rigid exclusiveness, curiously 
enough, the more rigid or firm that spirit of exclusive- 
ness became, and it was at its very height at the time 
of the Christian era. 

In the second place we see how, little by little, the 
enthusiasm of the priests and people more and more 
centered around the ritual, the code of law, and less 
and less around the spirit of the old prophecy. If you 
want one single cue to the appearance of Jesus and the 
revolution brought about through his teachings, you 
have it in this single fact of the triumph of Formalism, 
or Externalism, in the religious life of the Hebrew 
people. 

What man could have foreseen that the fourth com- 
mandment in the Decalogue would have assumed more 


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143 


importance, perhaps, than all the other nine command- 
ments taken together; that more emphasis would fall 
upon the careful observance of the Sabbath day than 
on the avoidance of stealing, or lying, or murder, or 
covetousness ? 

At the dawn of the Christian era prophecy was sadly 
in the back ground, and the priestly attitude over- 
whelmingly in the foreground. The chief purpose in 
reading the prophets at that time was in order to find 
indications of the coming Messiah. But the judg- 
ments, the awful ethical judgments of the prophets, 
appeared to have lost their significance. 

Let me give you some illustrations of the emphasis 
on forms or formalism of the code of law at the time 
of Jesus. The commandment about keeping holy the 
Sabbath day would appear to be simple enough as we 
find it in the Decalogue. It said that people were not 
to work on that day. But this was not enough. It 
had to be told just what kind of work one might and 
might not do. There were, therefore, thirty-nine 
kinds of work which the rabbis had decided were for- 
bidden on the seventh day. The amount of time and 
thought required in deciding just what one might or 
might not do on the Sabbath was almost enough to 
exhaust one’s whole life. It was determined just how 
far one might walk on foot on the seventh day, ac- 
cording to distance of cubits. It was decided ex- 
actly what amount of cooking was to be allowed, or 
what sort of housework was permissible. “Bread 
might not be put into the oven in the twilight, nor 
cakes upon the coals, unless their surface could harden 
while it was still day.” But how much was implied in 
the word “surface” was a question raised. And the 
answer comes, “If there is only time for the under 
surface to harden.” 

The caution even went further in forbidding the peo- 
ple to “read by lamplight on the Sabbath or to cleanse 
clothing from vermin.” It was prescribed that on the 
Sabbath day “One might not climb a tree, ride upon 
a horse, clap with the hands or dance.” A great deal 
of discussion evolved around the point as to whether it 


144 


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would be allowable to extinguish a light on the 
Sabbath day. The question arose as to whether a crip- 
pled man “could go out on his wooden leg”; one au- 
thority allows it, but another does not. As for ex- 
tinguishing a light because one is afraid of robbers or 
the evil spirit, or for the sake of a sick person that he 
might sleep, that was permissible. If it were done, 
however, in order to save the oil, the lamp or the wick, 
then it was wicked. 

Do not overlook the fact that all this was not re- 
garded as new teaching. Oh, no, they found it all, 
somehow, in the teachings of Moses ; they managed to 
get it out of the original “Law.” 

If there was extraordinary formalism with regard 
to keeping the Sabbath day, so also we find the same 
formalism, or externalism, with regard to prayer. 

Of all forms of worship the one which is most dis- 
tinctly spiritual is prayer. I wish I had the time to 
give you some notion of what the teachings on this 
subject had come to. One important phase of prayer 
was “grace” connected with food. It had to be deter- 
mined just when the words should be said. There 
had to be different forms of prayer according to the 
kind of food which was eaten. There was one to be 
used for the fruit of trees, another for wine, another 
for fruits of the ground, for bread, or vegetables, for 
vinegar, for locusts, milk, cheese, eggs. If, for in- 
stance, one had eaten three kinds of food — figs, grapes 
and pomegranates — at the same meal, he had to say 
three separate prayers; the one befitting the figs, the 
one for grapes and the one for the pomegranates. The 
question came up “For how much food a prayer was 
requisite.” If, for instance, you put a crumb of bread 
in your mouth was it necessary to say a prayer? On 
this point there was a good deal of dispute. One au- 
thority said food the size of an olive; another said 
food the size of an egg. Still another question was 
raised on this point : Suppose one had forgotten to say 
grace when eating, and happened to think of it after- 
ward, up to what time should he then say grace ? And 
the answer came “Till the food is digested.” 


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145 


This is enough to give you an idea of what was going 
on in the spiritual life of the people of Jerusalem at 
the time of the Christian era. Do not for a moment 
assume that it was all like this. We have accounts of 
many beautiful souls in those days, who had another 
spiritual life quite unlike that which was according to 
such formalism or externalism. But this was the kind 
which had the powerful hold on the people. The men 
who obeyed all these precepts were, as a rule, the men 
who were looked up to and revered by the average He- 
brew citizen in Palestine at this time, especially in 
that part of Palestine centering around Jerusalem. 

Now you know what all this means, plainly enough. 
The old Judaism of the exile had gone off on a tangent. 
The men who inaugurated those commands meant 
them for a purpose. If the flesh of swine was for- 
bidden as food, it was because they assumed, and per- 
haps with reason at the time, that swine’s flesh was an 
injury to the health. And inasmuch as in those days 
all laws, whether political, social or religious, were 
brought under one category, the command against 
eating swine’s flesh was made not only a health law 
but a religious law. The trouble then is, that after a 
time, when the conditions in regard to health laws 
change, these same laws may keep their hold because 
they have received the sanction of religion. Their 
purpose has come to an end, but by having become a 
law of the church they receive a mystical significance. 
In the original sense, for instance, one served God 
by keeping one’s body healthy, and one kept one’s 
body healthy in part by not eating of the flesh of 
swine. Now let that middle phase or purpose be lost 
sight of or changed, and then you have it reading as if 
one served God directly by not eating the flesh of 
swine. When you have reached that condition, you 
will come to a stage which only revolution can alter. 

So it was with the Sabbath day. Those who insti- 
tuted it saw the reason for it. In the first place it was 
essential to the health of the body that there should 
be a day of rest. In the second place it was essential 
in order that the spiritual life should have some oppor- 


146 


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tunity for culture. Therefore, in its original form, the 
commandment would have read this way: One serves 
God by cultivating one’s spiritual life, and one culti- 
vates one’s spiritual life by setting apart one day and 
not working on that day. Now drop out the middle 
link and you have the condition of formalism: One 
serves God by not working on the Sabbath day. 

That was not the purpose of the Sabbath day at all. 
But when, under certain circumstances, the middle 
link drops out in the minds of the people you have a 
complete change in the religious conceptions. The 
commandment which had been only a means, becomes 
now an end in itself. Not working on the Sabbath 
day, even if you do nothing to build up your spiritual 
life, becomes a mystical way of serving God. 

But under any circumstances you know the condi- 
tions. In Palestine at the time of the Christian era 
there were three great sects. These sects had no ex- 
istence at the time the Jewish Church was first estab- 
lished. The popular school of teachers in Jerusalem, 
however, was the one which reveled in this formalism. 

In this account I think I have given you the cue to 
the rise of Christianity. The coming of Jesus, in a 
word, again humanly speaking, was simply a reap- 
pearance of the old prophetic spirit. It had been 
dormant for a long time in Israel. But a spirit like 
that, once inaugurated, may sleep, but it never dies. 
The birth of Christianity is to be attributed to the old 
antithesis between priest and prophet. And Jesus 
stood for the old prophetic spirit of Israel. In him 
again it was rather “Thus saith the Lord” than “thus 
said Moses.” The cue to the movement inaugurated 
by Jesus lies in the revulsion which had to come 
against this formalism or externalism as it had tri- 
umphed for a time in Palestine. 

In the midst of this curious externalism and formal- 
ism, with the emphasis on hair-splitting distinctions 
about prayers, Sabbath-day keeping, fasting, cleanli- 
ness, the kinds of food one was to eat or avoid, as if 
that made the whole of religion — in the midst of all 
this, the new voice appeared and the new personality. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


147 


And what was the attitude with which this formalism 
was met? Was it mainly by a series of ethical judg- 
ments such as the old prophets uttered? No, it was 
something else. The new spirit was rather one of 
what we should call humanitarianism. And it was a 
teaching which utterly baffled the rabbis of Jerusalem. 
Its purpose was to shift the religious interests of the 
people along other lines ; not to overwhelm them with 
denunciations, but to console and comfort them with 
another ethical teaching. It was the indifference of 
Jesus to the formalism, rather than his attacks upon it, 
which brought down the wrath of the leaders of the 
people. He triumphed over it, not by denunciations 
like the old prophets, but by a certain spiritual aloof- 
ness from it. He cut the old formalism in two with one 
single statement, and threw the commandments back 
on their original purpose. It was when he said : “The 
Sabbath zvas made for man and not man for the Sab- 
bath” There was nothing new in this. It was through 
and through the spirit of the teachings of the old pro- 
phets. It was simply the prophet in antithesis to the 
priest. 

But the rabbis could not see it. They were study- 
ing the prophetic writings not for their ethical import, 
but in order to discover forecasts of the future. Yet 
all over Palestine was to be heard this other attitude: 
“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, 
and unto God the things which are God’s.” 

The dominant feature of the new teaching of Jesus 
was its strange, incomprehensible attitude of submis- 
siveness. Amidst all that spirit of hate which reigned 
so much throughout Judea, hate among the sects or 
classes of the Hebrews themselves, common hate 
against the soldiers or legions of the Roman Empire, 
hate for the Gentile or anything non- Jewish, came this 
strange teaching of “Love your enemies: Bless them 
that curse you: Bless and curse not. Consider the 
lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not neither 
do they spin ; yet Solomon in all his glory was not ar- 
rayed like one of these. The life is more than meat 
and the body than raiment.” 


148 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


We are back again to the old subjective religion, 
back to the prophetic idea of worship as something 
which comes out of the heart or through the life, 
rather than in obedience to a code of laws. 

Explain Jesus I cannot, any more than I can ex- 
plain the coming of the other great prophets. He be- 
longs to the mysteries of which I speak, and which 
neither science nor philosophy can account for. Why 
the prophetic spirit should have revived at this time, 
why it should have appeared once more in Jesus, I 
must leave for you to decide for yourselves. As to 
whether Jesus ever personally himself asserted his 
Messiahship, it has been denied by one class of scholars 
and asserted by another class. And both classes of 
scholars have been men of distinction and trustworthi- 
ness. Between them I do not care to decide. 

Had Jesus remained in Galilee, where he was born 
and grew up, he might never have been a martyr, but 
when he went to Jerusalem it was another matter. 
The calm indifference of the man to all that legalism or 
formalism which had been built up by the rabbis was 
like a blow in their faces. And at last it did come to 
open rupture. Once we find that Jesus did speak out, 
and the woes which he pronounced on the Pharisees 
will never be forgotten. In those woes there is abso- 
lutely nothing new. They are simply the reappear- 
ances of the old prophetic spirit. They could have 
been spoken by Amos or Hosea, Isaiah or Jeremiah. 
He is speaking of the Pharisees as he says : 

“Yea, they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, 
and lay them on men’s shoulders ; but they themselves will not 
move them with the finger. But all their works they do for 
to be seen of men !” 

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye 
tithe mint and anise and cummin, and have left undone the 
weightier matters of the law, judgment and mercy and faith. 
But these ye ought to have done, and not to have left the 
other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain out the gnat, 
and swallow the camel.” 

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye 
cleanse the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within 
they are full from extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


149 


cleanse first the inside of the cup and the platter, that the out- 
side thereof may become clean also.” 

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; for ye 
are like unto whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear beau- 
tiful, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones and of all un- 
cleanness. Even so, ye also outwardly appear righteous unto 
men, but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” 

Had such a tone been taken long before this era, 
had it come in its full might two centuries previous, 
perhaps it would have given rise to a universalized Ju- 
daism rather than a new religion. But now it was too 
late; the lines had become rigid. This formalism or 
externalism had had iso years in which to make its 
way. 

Why all this should have led to the martyrdom of 
Jesus we shall never fully understand. The history 
here must remain in part unrecorded. When we come 
down to the plain matter-of-fact history, I think the 
evidence is pretty clear that the influence of Jesus was 
mainly on a few persons. And it was those few who 
founded and spread the new religion. It is doubtful 
for instance, whether five years after the death of Je- 
sus there were more than 2,000 or 3,000 out-and-out 
acknowledged followers of the new religion. But the 
spirit for it had begun and nothing could stop it. 
First came the man, then came the literature. After 
Jesus comes the New Testament. 


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NEW TESTAMENT; ITS GROWTH 
AND COMPLETION 


In coming to speak of the growth and completion 
of the Bible as we have it to-day, I am sorry that what 
I shall have to say must be largely a dry statement 
of facts and dates. There will be little time for me to 
talk about the contents of this last portion of our 
great Sacred Literature, or as to what is really con- 
tained within the Bible. If, however, you are going to 
read the Bible understanding^, you can only do it 
by knowing something of its history. And I am 
trying to lay such a foundation of history in your 
minds, so that when you come to this literature your- 
selves, or read it once more, you may be able to enter 
more appreciatively into its spirit. 

This portion of the Bible goes under the name of 
the New Testament. The word “Testament” would 
perhaps better have been “Covenant.” The distinc- 
tion between the names of the Old and New Testa- 
ments grew up after the Scriptures had been com- 
pleted, through the conception of Christianity as in- 
volving a kind of new covenant between the Deity 
and the human race — a covenant which had done away 
with the old one which had really been with the Deity 
and the Hebrew race. A suggestion for this would 
scarcely be found in the memoirs telling us of the life 
or teachings of Jesus, but grew rather, out of the 
writings or teachings which we find in the “Epistles.” 

As you know, the tendency among the scholars with 
regard to the historical trustworthiness of many por- 
tions of the New Testament and the traditions to be 
found there, has been somewhat reactionary. The 
older school, starting mainly in Germany, somewhere 
about the middle of our century, was rather iconoclas- 
tic. 

A tendency was inaugurated at that time to look 
upon the books of the New Testament as being much 


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151 


later in time than tradition had supposed, belonging 
perhaps, most of them, to the second century. On 
this score, as I have said, within the last few years the 
attitude has been reactionary, not so much with re- 
gard to the authorship of the books in the New Testa- 
ment, but as to the time when these books were writ- 
ten. There is a growing opinion among the best 
scholars that quite a portion of the New Testament 
belongs strictly within the first century of the Chris- 
tian era, and that tradition was not so far out in plac- 
ing the New Testament at the time before the first 
century had come to an end. 

This attitude naturally emphasizes the importance 
of the personal influence of Jesus himself and makes 
a great deal more of what he accomplished on earth; 
whereas the former attitude in the middle of the cen- 
tury, attributed far more to the followers of Jesus 
who came in the next one or two generations after 
him. 

This last portion of the Bible, which we call the New 
Testament, as you are aware, is made up first of four 
memoirs of Jesus, called the “Gospels,” of which I 
spoke in my last lecture. Then you have one book 
describing the acts of the Apostles of Jesus for a few 
years after his death, but confining the attention for 
the most part to the work of only two or three of the 
disciples or apostles, chiefly the new apostle Saint 
Paul. Following this, you have a series of books, 
about twent3 r -one in number, called “Epistles.” These 
consist of documents in the form of letters of coun- 
sel, advice or suggestions, by different individuals, 
written usually to special churches. They are there- 
fore quite unlike the old Prophets. The spirit of 
the prophets is to be found in the memoirs, or “Gos- 
pels” rather than in the Epistles. 

These letters as a rule were written directly to 
special churches, and the authors were addressing 
themselves to particular questions which may have 
been submitted to them, or to special conditions of 
some particular church. It is very important therefore 
in studying these Epistles not to attribute too universal 


152 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


a character to them. A good deal which they contain 
is only to be fully understood by knowing what 
brought out the statements of the writers. But it is in 
these Epistles that you find the development of the 
doctrinal side of Christianity. It is here that you come 
upon the theories of the Atonement ; and it is in these 
Epistles where you strike the great emphasis which 
was coming to be laid upon the death of Jesus, as 
if that death had a peculiar, mystical significance. 

This point is most important in understanding the 
early growth of the church. In the first century there 
was evidently much less attention paid to the life of 
Jesus than to the significance of his death and the 
resurrection. 

At the end of the New Testament, we come upon 
another document wholly unlike either the Epistles 
or the Gospels. It used to go under the name of the 
“Apocalypse,” but nowadays it bears the name of 
“The Book of Revelation.” It is very much of the 
same character as those Apocalypses which had grown 
up during the last two hundred years before the be- 
ginning of the Christian era. It suggests the book of 
“Daniel” or the “Biook of Enoch,” and unquestion- 
ably has reference to the expectation of the downfall 
of the Roman Empire and the coming of the New 
Kingdom of Heaven with the return of Jesus. It is 
in this book where you have the beautiful sentiments 
of the picture of the final rest to come to the righteous, 
of “A pure river of water of life, clear as a crystal,” 
and of a place where it is said “There shall be no night 
there; they need no candle, neither light of the sun.” 
It is in these chapters where we hear of the “Holy 
City, New Jerusalem coming down from God out of 
Heaven.” And we read of the time when “God shall 
wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be 
no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither 
shall there be any more pain; for the former things 
are passed away.” 

As to this last Book of Revelation, a pretty strong 
opinion has developed to the effect that it is not, or 
was not, an original work, by a follower of the new 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


153 


Prophet; but that quite large portions of it come di- 
rectly from Jewish sources, from those Apocalypses 
which had become so popular in the Jewish Church 
during that epoch I have spoken of ; and that what the 
author did, was to work it over, remodel it, make a 
number of additions, and give it a strictly Christian 
form. But whatever may have been its origin, it be- 
came, later on, a very vital part of the new Christian- 
ity. Yet, for several hundred years this book hung in 
doubt and there was more scruple as to the justification 
for making it a part of the Sacred Scriptures of Chris- 
tianity than in regard to any of the other books of the 
New Testament. Indeed, it came very near not get- 
ting into the Bible at all. 

It is a striking fact that none of this literature is 
written in the language of Jesus — the Aramaic. Nor 
is it in the language of the Prophets, the Hebrew. It 
is in “Greek” that it has come down to us ; so that it is 
all “second hand” by its very language. 

As to the New Testament, there are a number of 
facts which must be kept carefully before the atten- 
tion in order to appreciate the significance of this por- 
tion of the Bible. In the first place there is a strong 
opinion among the best scholars that we have not 
a single writing in the New Testament coming from 
any one who had ever seen or lived with Jesus. We 
think of the New Testament in a way, as the founda- 
tion of Christianity, as the Bible of the Early Church. 
You might fancv yourself going back to the early 
times and entering an assembly of the followers of 
Jesus on a Sunday, possibly in the City of Rome about 
75 years after Jesus’ death, and you would probably 
expect to see there a scroll of writings brought for- 
ward with reverence, as being the Sacred Scriptures 
of the new church and consisting of the New Testa- 
ment. But you would have seen nothing of the kind. 
Not until about the year 150 A. D. do we come upon 
a feeling among the disciples of Jesus that they had 
a New Scripture, sacred and inspired in the sense in 
which what we now call the Old Testament was looked 
upon as sacred or inspired. In round numbers, there- 


154 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


fore, we must fix upon the year 200 as about the time 
when the new church began to recognize that it had 
its own class of Sacred Scriptures apart from the 
writings of the Old Testament. 

Furthermore, I must remind you that we have no 
evidence that there was anything like a real memoir 
of Jesus, such as we have in any of the four Gospels, 
existing for an entire generation after the death of 
Jesus. A generation, in round numbers, thirty- three 
years, is, however, a pretty long time. The oldest 
books of the New Testament, therefore, in all proba- 
bility are not the Gospels, but a number of these 
Epistles. Tradition has ascribed thirteen or fourteen 
of these Epistles to the great apostle Paul, who, prob- 
ably with the possible exception of Peter, had more 
influence than any other one man in the first genera- 
tion after the death of Jesus in spreading Christianity. 
But this tradition with regard to the authorship of 
these epistles has gone to pieces. So much so, indeed, 
that in my “Teacher’s Bible,” which is, of course, con- 
servative to the highest degree, we see that one of 
these epistles, that to the “Hebrews,” although in the 
text itself bearing the heading, “The Epistle of Paul 
the Apostle to the Hebrews,” in the notes in the end 
stands separate and not under the list of the Epistles 
written by the Apostle Paul. When the great prob- 
lems arose in connection with the Higher Criticism 
in the middle of the century, four of these epistles 
were left as unquestionably having been written by 
Paul himself; and these four probably constitute the 
oldest portion of the New Testament, written some- 
where about the middle of the first century. The four 
I have in mind are the two to the Church at Corinth, 
called the First and Second Corinthians ; and one to the 
Church at Rome and another to the Church at Gala- 
tia — these two bearing the name, “To the Romans” 
and “To the Galatians.” * In these Epistles you see 
the birth of doctrinal Christianity. 

*Epistle to Philippians is now generally regarded as Paul’s, 

and this admission brings in also Colossians, Ephesians (at 
least as a working over of a Pauline original). Philemon, 
also First and Second Thessalonians, are now admitted by very 
many. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


155 


To be sure, within the last ten or fifteen years, 
scholars of high standing in Holland and Switzerland 
have even begun to doubt the authorship of these four 
epistles, and until their standpoint has been further 
threshed out we cannot be sure with regard to them. 
But the probability is pretty strong in favor of these 
four writings, as I have said, being the oldest portion 
of the New Testament. Recently, however, a great 
German scholar by the name of Zahn has made another 
stir by asserting that the oldest portion of the New 
Testament was the “Epistle of James.” If this were 
true it would give us a radically different impression 
of primitive Christianity from that usually received. 

Another point to which I want to call your attention 
is that it looks pretty certain that the authors of these 
Epistles and of the last of the books in the New Testa- 
ment, had not read the Gospels or Memoirs of Jesus, 
which we find there in the New Testament. How do 
we know that? you ask. Well, I give you one pretty 
good piece of evidence. If you turn to these memoirs, 
you will find over and over again how Jesus was ac- 
customed to speak of himself as the “Son of Man.” * 
It reads like a classical phrase and must have been 
used over and over again by Jesus with regard to him- 
self. How, then, do you account for the fact that in 
not one single instance do you find this phrase with re- 
gard to Jesus anywhere in all the rest of the New Tes- 
tament? Had the writers of the Epistles been fa- 
miliar with these Memoirs, surely they could not have 
ignored so striking a form of speech as we have in that 
phrase coming from the lips of Jesus. The fact of it is, 
in the first years after the crucifixion interest centered 
more and more on the one fact of the Messiahship of 
Jesus, rather than on his life and general teachings. 
Hence before the next generation had gone by, the 


♦Now regarded by many as a Messianic title adopted by 
Jesus from Daniel 7. 


156 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


one great thought of the people was on the mystical 
significance of his death and resurrection. 

Does it not seem passing strange that those who had 
known Jesus should not have set to work to write 
up his life, and record all that they knew about him, 
for future generations ? The question leads me to an- 
other statement as a practical certainty, and it is to 
the effect that not one of the writers of the books of 
the New Testament could have had any notion that 
he was drafting something which was to become a 
part of a future “Bible.” Not one of them was writing 
with the idea of preparing something to be handed 
down to future ages. In every instance we can be 
practically sure that what was written was written for 
a purpose. If a new Gospel or a new Memoir was 
prepared, it was drawn up with the idea of correcting 
certain misapprehensions with regard to Jesus, which 
the author felt were prevalent among certain classes of 
people. In each instance these books must therefore 
have been put forth with an eye to certain conditions 
of the time. 

We come back to the other question, the reason for 
this? Why it was that no Memoirs of any conse- 
quence arose for a generation after the death of Jesus ; 
and why it was that not a single writer thought of pre- 
paring something to hand down to future ages as a 
part of a new Sacred Scripture ? The answer is pretty 
clear. 

If you had been much interested in Bible problems a 
year or two ago, and had been in the cities in the 
East, like New York or Philadelphia, or Boston, and 
had been standing in book stores where theological 
literature was placed out for sale, and it had been a 
Monday forenoon, the chances are you would have 
seen knots of clergymen standing together and talk- 
ing in a rather agitated voice over something which 
had recently happened. About two years ago there 
was a mild form of earthquake in the folds of ortho- 
doxy in this country. A writer of high rank as a 
scholar in an orthodox seminary, had given a plain 
intimation in one of the chapters of a recent book 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


157 


by him, that Jesus himself had been misled with re- 
gard to one of his own expectations ; that Jesus him- 
self had looked upon the end of the world as pretty 
near, and pointed to his own second coming as not 
far away, perhaps within the lives of those around him. 
Whether this statement is true or not, I am not con- 
cerned to decide. It is not of much consequence. 
After the mild earthquake had subsided, even the 
orthodox found it was not necessarily inconsistent 
with their views about Jesus from their standpoint. 

But be this as it may, the main point is that beyond 
any question throughout the Christian churches of the 
first century there was a very strong conviction that 
the New Jerusalem was soon to come, and with it was 
to come the reappearance of Jesus and the Judgment 
Day. With them it was only a matter of years. Not 
for a moment could they consider that it could be a 
matter of centuries. Opinions differed' as to whether 
there was to be a destruction of the earth at once, and 
a passing of the righteous over to a Judgment Day 
and a Heaven, or whether Jesus was first to come back 
to the earth and set up a new kingdom; a new king- 
dom of Love — a kingdom of Justice and Righteous- 
ness in this world. 

One or the other of these beliefs was very strong 
everywhere. And this fact of itself explains why the 
interest of the early followers of Jesus centered so 
much on two or three facts, such as his Messiahship, 
his death and the expectation of his second coming. If 
that Judgment Day was soon coming and Jesus was 
ere long to reappear, what use for memoirs telling of 
his life? What use for more Sacred Scripture? What 
use for preparing anything to be handed down to fu- 
ture ages ? The main desire was to meet and talk with 
the teachers of the new church, and get advice or sug- 
gestions from these teachers. Letters of counsel or ad- 
monition would be necessary, no matter how soon the 
end of the world was coming. And hence it was that 
these “Epistles” naturally became the first material 
of a New Testament. 


158 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


There are most beautiful passages in these Epistles. 
I could give you the choicest collection of ethical 
precepts which mortal man could ask for, made up 
from these “letters” which we find in the middle por- 
tion of the New Testament. Yet half or perhaps three- 
fourths of what you would find there is doctrinal ma- 
terial, or advice or suggestions with regard to special 
issues raised in the particular church to which the let- 
ter is addressed. 

Then, you ask, if we are pretty well assured that 
most of these books in the New Testament were not 
written by the men to whom tradition ascribes them, 
who were the authors? Where did the books come 
from, and just when were they written? I must own 
that these are very hard questions to answer. If there 
is anything in the world that would make a man’s head 
swim, it is to delve into the recent literature discussing 
the authorship and dates and books of the New Tes- 
tament. You could make a good sized public library 
out of this literature alone. If you could see how 
they have ransacked every scrap of manuscript of the 
first centuries, which may have come down to us, 
studied every phase to be found there, analyzed every 
word and phrase in the New Testament, compared 
one phrase in one part with one phrase in another part, 
searched through all the church fathers for possible 
allusions or quotations from Scripture; and then, if 
you could read something of the arguments pro and 
con with regard to the outcome, it would suggest to 
you the description of the battle of the angels in mid- 
air, such as you have in Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” 

As to negative phases of authorship, I can give you 
one or two samples. 

Take the Gospel “according to St. John.” This 
Gospel has caused more discussion than all the others 
put together, because it presents a strikingly different 
picture of Jesus from what you get out of the other 
three Gospels. It was supposed to have been written 
by the disciple whom Jesus loved more than all the 
others, and one who was with him during his last 
days and who stood by the cross to the last moment. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 159 

But when you turn to the account of the last days of 
Jesus in this Gospel, how are you going to account 
for the fact that it has nothing to say with regard 
to the wonderful scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, 
containing those sublime words of Jesus “Not my 
will, but Thine be done.” Even the shortest memoir 
of them all, which is only about half as long as any 
of the others, the one called “Mark,” has an account 
of this “Gethsemane” experience. It is contained in 
one form or another in all of the other memoirs. And 
this would give overwhelming reasons for assuming 
that some very serious experiences took place on that 
last night before Jesus was seized by the authorities. 
Yet this fourth memoir does not even mention such 
an experience, beyond saying that “Jesus entered a 
garden where he tarried for a time until the authorities 
came out to seize him.” According to the other me- 
moirs, the Apostle John himself was present in the 
garden with Jesus. Yet not a word have we in the 
gospel attributed to him with regard to what took 
place there. 

However, this is a side issue. The opinion of some 
scholars is very strong, indeed, as I have said, that 
we have nothing in the New Testament directly in 
writing from any one who had lived or known Jesus 
personally. * 

The fact of it is, as we have pointed out, the New 
Testament was a growth, just like the Old Testament. 
It developed little by little according to the accident 
of circumstances. The Hebrew literature covers a 
period of six or seven hundred years, as we have said ; 
whereas practically all that we have in the New Testa- 
ment was probably written within one hundred years 
after the death of Jesus. There may be, and probably 
are, passages inserted here and there, because as I 
explained to you in the last lecture, we have the evi- 


*The authenticity of John’s Gospel (and the First Epistle) 
is accepted by many, and by a growing number, quite apart 
from theological prepossessions — e. g. the Unitarian Ezra Ab- 
bot and James Drummond. 


160 THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 

dence of passages having been inserted into these books 
hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, and which 
have been omitted in our English revised version of 
the Bible. It would be nothing strange if in doing the 
copying work of those days, a scribe had added in a 
word or a line of explanation now and then. Yet, it 
would be absurd to assume, as many a radical might 
have done, that the whole of the New Testament is 
made up of just such additions or interpolations. If 
a phrase occurs very rarely, you may perhaps fancy 
that it went in as an addition. For instance, only once 
in all the four memoirs of Jesus do you find the form- 
ula, “In the name of the Father and the Son and the 
Holy Ghost.” It would look as if that phrase or form- 
ula grew up after the death of Jesus; and if so, it 
would be quite natural that later on it should come to 
be inserted in the memoirs. The point I am showing 
you is, that the doctrinal side of Christianity comes 
rather from the Epistles. 

How much emphasis did Jesus himself lay on this 
doctrinal side? As to that, we shall never be able 
to answer. While the disciples or teachers of early 
Christianity may have fully believed that every single 
thought they uttered could be traced to the stand- 
point of Jesus, yet they naturally threw their emphasis 
on that side in which they were the more interested; 
and hence it is quite possible that the phase of religion 
which Jesus talked the least about, may have come to 
assume the most imprtant role of all, within a hundred 
years after his death. The germs of it may have been 
in the life or teachings of Jesus, but no one could have 
foretold just in what direction his teachings would 
have assumed the greatest importance. 

If you come down to the actual facts of the case, I 
think there can be no doubt that the memoirs about 
Jesus in the New Testament have had far less in- 
fluence in developing Christianity, than the Epistles of 
the New Testament. While in these memoirs you can 
see that the ethical phase is decidedly in the fore- 
ground; when you come to trace up the history of 
Christianity, you feel that this ethical phase has been 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


161 


sadly in the background. The number who believe 
in the mystical significance of the death of Jesus, 
could perhaps be counted by the hundreds of millions 
of the people to-day. But the number who under- 
take to live out fully and completely the teachings 
of the Sermon on the Mount, could be counted in the 
hundreds with the millions left off. And if Christian- 
ity survives as a world religion, it will be owing to 
these hundreds, rather than the hundreds of millions. 

In speaking of the growth of the New Testament, 
we must not overlook the fact that while the develop- 
ment of Judaism went on for the greater part within 
Palestine itself, the teachings of Jesus during the first 
century were coming in contact with the world at 
large. The New Testament was taking its shape, not 
in Palestine, but throughout the Roman Empire. The 
teachers of the new religion were coming in contact 
with the ideas and teachings of other religions and 
foreign systems of philosophy. This fact had a great 
deal to do in giving the new teaching a more universal 
character than the older system of Judaism had ever 
had. 

Humanly speaking, Christianity, as a system of 
thought, was a fusion of the religion of Judaism, with 
the religion of Zoroaster from the East and Greek 
philosophy from the West. The partial fusion with 
the religion of Persia had taken place before the Chris- 
tian era, with the introduction of beliefs in immortal- 
ity, a judgment day, a heaven and a hell, and an 
angelology. All this seems to have been adopted by 
Jesus himself. But the fusion with Greek philosophy, 
of course, came later on after the death of Jesus, dur- 
ing the first hundred years while the New Testament 
was taking shape. The memoir which bears the name 
of the “Gospel according to John” shows very mani- 
fest evidence of the spirit of Greek philosophy as it 
prevailed in the first century of the Christian era. St. 
Paul’s conception of “communing” with the Divine, 
or being united with the Divine, is singularly Platonic. 

This does- not necessarily reflect on the originality of 
Jesus; nor on the other hand need it overthrow your 


162 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


conceptions of the Divine aspect in that life, if you 
wish to believe in that aspect. Greek philosophy itself 
may have been necessary as a means for developing 
in more complete form what had only been germinal 
in the teachings of Jesus. You can say if you choose, 
that this was the method of Providence itself in work- 
ing out more elaborately into a system, the movement 
which Jesus inaugurated. Whatever fusion may have 
taken place, it must also be made clear that the out- 
come was emphatically a new religion, or a new re- 
ligious spirit, such as had not existed before. But 
in the new religious spirit we can see that the inspired 
men of other races were to contribute their share. 

Now to go back to the growth of the New Testa- 
ment: While it is true that a number of the Epistles 
were written before the memoirs; on the other hand, 
we have the best of reasons for thinking that the me- 
moirs in our New Testament first got recognition as 
having a peculiar sanctity attached to them. They 
were the first Sacred Literature to be brought together 
for the new church. For a long time the epistles were 
held as special documents by the churches to whom 
they were addressed, as their property, rather than as 
something which was ever to belong to a Bible. 

But at about the end of the first quarter of the sec- 
ond century, we find evidences to the effect that these 
four memoirs were used together, by churches in vari- 
ous parts of the Roman Empire, as taking rank over 
any other of the newer religious literature. Here, 
therefore, we have the starting point or nucleus for a 
New Testament. 

Gradually, however, the various Epistles of the New 
Testament began to be brought together one after an- 
other, and to assume more and more importance, so 
that toward the close of the second century, in round 
numbers about 200 A. D., there was a pretty general 
consensus of opinion setting apart certain Epistles and 
certain Gospels as a new Sacred Literature, and in- 
cluding the larger portion of what we now call the 
New Testament. At the same time, there seems even 
for centuries after that date, to have been a good deal 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


163 


of difference of opinion as to the exact list of books 
which should constitute the canon of the New Testa- 
ment. Some other books came very near getting into 
the Bible, and a few others in the New Testament 
came very near dropping out of it or not being re- 
ceived into it. No council of the whole church ever 
settled it. 

I remind you again of the celebrated Sinaitic manu- 
script found in a monastery near Mount Sinai, which 
dates about 400 A. D. When the great German 
scholar discovered this, in fear lest he might never see 
the manuscript again, he took it to his cell and set to 
work to copy out one special book he found there. 
And why? Because it was a book of which there had 
been a great deal of talk in the early centuries, but 
of which no copy had survived. It bore the name of 
the Epistle of Barnabas. 

In this Sinaitic manuscript, were two books or por- 
tions of books, which have not been included in the 
recognized New Testament. Then, too, as I told you, 
the “Book of Revelation’’ caused a great deal of dis- 
pute; and for a long while there was decided inclina- 
tion among the church fathers to exclude it from the 
canon. 

You may ask what should have been the cause of 
dispute as to the books which really made up the 
New Testament. Why should they not have taken 
these memoirs or these Epistles as a part of the New 
Testament? But I must remind you that our New 
Testament constitutes only a small portion of a large 
literature in circulation during the first centuries of 
the Christian era, and all of which purported to be 
of the same sacred character; most of it purporting 
to emanate from the apostles or early fathers of the 
church in the first century. It may surprise you to 
know that we find reference among the fathers of the 
church of the first centuries to at least a full score of 
gospels or memoirs of Jesus, each bearing its own 
name and claiming on its face a high authority. They 
had a Gospel “According to Saint Peter,” another 
Gospel “According to Andrew,” a Gospel “Accord- 


164 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


mg to Bartholomew.” As there were twelve apostles, 
it would seem as if tradition had ascribed a special 
memoir or Gospel to each one of them. There is even 
reference to a Gospel “According to Judas.” Then 
there were no end of books giving an account of the 
“Acts” of the Apostles, descriptive therefore of the 
first generation of work after the death of Jesus. Be- 
sides this, of course, there were a number of “Apo- 
calypses,” or Books of Revelation. 

A small portion of this vast literature has come down 
to us and I have here in my hand a volume of transla- 
tions of that so-called “Apocryphal” New Testament. 
Some of it makes beautiful reading; other portions 
are trivial in the extreme. One or two fragments of 
that Apocryphal literature have been absorbed in the 
Book of Common Prayer of the English church ; as for 
instance, the well-known Apostles’ Creed. Tradition 
has it, that as there are twelve statements in that 
Creed,* each apostle contributed a singe statement to 
it. Two of these Apocryphal books ranked highly in 
the opinion of the early church fathers and came very 
nearly becoming a part of the New Testament, — the 
one entitled the Epistle of Barnabas and the other The 
Shepherd of Hernias. It is from some of that litera- 
ture, by the way, that the Old Masters took their con- 
ceptions for their famous paintings of the life of Je- 
sus. Naturally these Apocalypses have a good deal to 
tell us about those portions of the life of Jesus of which 
the memoirs in our New Testament have little to say; 
especially concerning the boyhood and youth of Jesus. 
We read a great deal about Joseph and Mary, the 
father and mother of Jesus; and of the wonderful 
things Jesus did as a boy. 

A good deal of this Apocryphal literature so-called, 
arose in the second century ; and you may ask what led 
to it, or why it was not adopted as a part of the New 
Testament. If the books bore the names of the apos- 

*The Apostles’ Creed cannot be called apocryphal. It was 
the old baptismal formula, to be traced back to the second 
century. The legend grew up that it was made by the Twelve 
— but only the legend is apocryphal. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


165 


ties, why were they not accepted? If they were re- 
jected as spurious, how shall we account for the fact 
that on sacred themes men could write down what 
they did not know to be true? 

It is an established fact, however, that regard for 
historic truth has not been a conspicuous feature of 
writers on matters pertaining to religion. I do not 
mean to say that men deliberately went against their 
consciences and boldly made up what they knew to be 
lies. But in those days, for one to tell a beautiful story 
about a man whose name and life one highly revered, 
even if one knew that story were not true, was not 
necessarily regarded as an evil. To compose some- 
thing in the honor of a being one loved, was to do 
something to show one’s spirit of loyalty. If it was 
the belief of the Christians who wrote those books, that 
these were the things that Jesus might have done, why 
then not show one’s love and one’s loyalty by drawing 
up such fanciful conceptions of the Great Master? 
Such inventive methods rather startle us perhaps. But 
it was not meant necessarily in an unworthy spirit or 
put forward with an unworthy motive. 

But you may ask, how did such books come to be 
attributed to the apostles as authors? As to that, we 
can explain that many of such writings were put forth 
anonymously. Then some copyist, seeing a resem- 
blance there to what tradition had ascribed to certain 
of the apostles, attaches the apostle’s name to it as the 
probable author. And so the name becomes fixed 
there. On the other hand, a writer might feel that he 
was doing honor to one of the apostles by attributing 
his gospel to such authority, that it was showing a 
high regard for the apostle himself in attaching such 
a name to it. 

The literature of the middle ages, for instance, is 
full to overflowing of the stories of the saints, some 
of which are true and some of which are all fancy. 
This was not done in the spirit of deliberate falsifica- 
tion. The motive was often high and pure. I only 
speak of this because accuracy in reporting facts or 
traditions on religious matters has seldom been re- 


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garded as of the greatest importance. But be that as 
it may, we know that a great deal of such literature did 
arise in the second century and some of it was exist- 
ing in the first century. In fact, within the very 
memoirs which we have in the New Testament, we 
have the assertion that quite a literature was in circu- 
lation at that time concerning the life or teaching of 
Jesus. The author of the third memoir called the Gos- 
pel “According to St. Luke,’’ begins by saying that 
inasmuch as many had taken it in hand to draw up a 
narrative concerning the subject in which they were 
all interested, it seemed good to him also to write out 
an account of what he knew, or had heard on the same 
subject. 

Just what led to the final adoption of these special 
four memoirs and the particular Epistles as they stand 
in our New Testament, we shall never know. It was 
not done by any conference, nor was the list estab- 
lished by anv Council. That much we are positive of. 
Custom was what decided it. The churches gradually 
settled down to this choice, out of the great amount of 
literature then in circulation. 

As to those four memoirs in the New Testament, 
I have said to you already that you can see that they, 
too, show evidences of growth. When they were first 
written, it is not at all likely that the authors fancied 
that they were writing for the distant future. They 
jotted down what they had heard from time to time. 
Then the manuscripts went out of their hands and 
were read by others, by whom in all probability addi- 
tions were made from time to time, or other portions 
with other stories incorporated. You can see at times 
where two or three accounts are run together into 
one. Or on the other hand, you observe where one 
anecdote concerning Jesus had developed into two 
forms and therefore become two different stories. For 
instance, in the account of “Feeding the multitude, 1 ” 
different reports made the numbers vary who were 
fed by Jesus ; and so probably grew up two different 
stories according to the difference in numbers. 

All three of the writers undoubtedly had other docu- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


167 


ments at command, one which was probably the well- 
known “Sayings of Matthew,” and which they incor- 
porated into their accounts, but not always in the 
same way. The fourth memoir, however, bears the 
evidence of having been written pretty much by one 
author, and shows decided influences from the Greek 
philosophy current at that day. 

This growth of the memoirs did not go on indefi- 
nitely, however, as I have said. The notion of the 
Gospels as all being made up of little pieces put to- 
gether at various times, will no longer hold. These 
memoirs to a large degree as they now stand, were 
written before the end of the first hundred years after 
the death of Jesus. They were collections of tradi- 
tions in circulation in different parts of the world, 
which the authors brought together as best they could. 

I am aware that such an historic method of treat- 
ing the New Testament may at first thought seem 
like doing away with its documents — as if no history 
were there at all — or as if there had never been any 
Jesus. And such rash statements have actually been 
made. But that would be absurd. You might as 
well say that there had been no George Washington, 
because within the last twenty-five years the critics 
have been studying his life pretty carefully and find 
that in the stories regarding him there was a growth, 
and that it was necessary to examine the development 
of the tradition concerning him quite thoroughly. Our 
discovery that the “Hatchet and Cherry Tree” story 
is all a myth, has not altered the reality or tremendous 
personality of Washington ; nor changed the fact that 
we owe this nation of ours to him more than to any 
other man, and that he was truly “The Father of his 
Country.” 

The world-movement which we call Christianity, 
had its start in a tremendous personality ; call that per- 
sonality Divine if you will, or human if you will. I 
leave you to take your choice. And in this New Tes- 
tament literature, as I said before, I can feel a unity 
which I cannot necessarily put into language. Only 
the weakest kind of minds are the ones whose beliefs 


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or conceptions go all to pieces from analysis or dissec- 
tion, because they ask or demand that they be allowed 
to keep all or nothing. The method I am pursuing as 
an historic study of the Scriptures has been with the 
idea which I announced to you at the outset, of giving 
you back your Bible. 

The confusion of thought one meets there, the lack 
of unity or coherence in the various parts of these 
Scriptures, has tended for a time to weaken or half- 
destroy their influence on many thoughtful persons. 
It has been in order to save these Scriptures for you 
that I have wanted to present them to you in this other 
light. When you see them as a growth, covering a 
period of one thousand years, then your whole attitude 
toward them changes; and you observe that the 
thoughts about God, or Justice, or Love; about man 
and the heart of man, could not be the same at the end 
of that thousand years as they were at the start. In- 
stead of having a vast number of minor truths or minor 
facts which do not hang together, you have one grow- 
ing truth as the core or kernel of the whole literature. 

In turning over the pages of this New Testament 
as the closing portions of the Bible, you feel that the 
emphasis of the teaching of the New Prophet lay in 
one supreme direction. It was to call the attention of 
the human race to the value of the spiritual side of life 
and to make man feel that the spiritual life as such 
was the one life worth having and worth living. It is 
this which has made the gospel of Jesus essentially the 
gospel of the poor, because the import of its teaching 
is to point to the value of the inside things. When 
you say in your despair, if you are hungry or house- 
less, or homeless, if you have lost all you ever had, are 
penniless and without work — when you say, “I have 
nothing, absolutely nothing, it is all gone,” then this 
teaching of Jesus, the New Prophet, gives you reply. 
The answer comes: “Stand up; you have got your 
soul and it is worth more than all the possessions you 
have lost or all that wealth you dreamed of and never 
got.” In this teaching of a soul, we seem to find the 
kernel of the thought of the New Prophet of Palestine. 


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169 


That word “Soul” alone as an outgrowth of Christi- 
anity has been one of the greatest gifts ever offered to 
the human race. What shall it profit a man to gain 
the whole world and lose his soul, was the teaching of 
Jesus. 

And with that doctrine of the soul in man, went the 
beautiful, sublime humanitarianism of the New Pro- 
phet. I call to your mind that picture of a Judgment 
Day in these memoirs of the New Testament. It is 
not of the fact of a Judgment Day that I am thinking, 
but of the kind of a Judgment Day which is pictured 
to us there. It is the King speaking to those on His 
right hand, and he is saying: 

“Come ye blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom pre- 
pared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was 
an hungered and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave 
me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and ye 
clothed me ; I was sick and ye visited me ; I was in prison and 
ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him say- 
ing: Lord when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee; or 
athirst and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger 
and took thee in ; or naked and clothed thee ? And when saw 
we thee sick or in prison and came unto thee? And the King 
shall answer and say unto them: Verily, I say unto you, in- 
asmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, ye did it 
unto me.” 

Is there not enough in that teaching to save you 
from any concern over the disputes as to what is his- 
tory and what is not history in the Bible? Is this 
not the humanitarianism we believe in to-day? 

And was it new? No. After all, it was the old 
prophetic spirit of Israel coming back again. The 
prophet Isaiah sang in the same spirit to the exiles 
of Babylon as he talked of their God, 

“Behold the Lord God will come as a mighty one and his 
arm shall rule for him. Behold his reward is with him and 
his recompense before him. He shall lead his flock like a 
shepherd, he shall gather the lambs in his arms and carry them 
in his bosom and shall gently lead those which are with 
young.” 


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And as I read this and then turn to that picture 
of the Judgment Day in the teachings of Jesus, it 
would seem as if I had found the kernel or core of both 
teachings ; and at this point I seem to see Judaism and 
Christianity fusing into one. 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


171 


THE BIBLE AS POETRY AND 
LITERATURE 


There is a splendid freedom for the mind in the 
ethical attitude — according to which our one purpose 
is to find light on the pathway of the true life and to 
learn how to lead the best life possible. No anxiety 
need concern us as to where our light comes from 
on this score, so long as we know that the light is 
genuine. I feel no hesitation in talking enthusiastic- 
ally over the literature of the Bible and the light 
which I find there — all the more for the reason that I 
feel no constraint as if I must find the light there, 
whether it is there or not. 

No authority requires it of me that I should place 
this literature higher in importance than the litera- 
ture of other religions or other races. I turn to its 
pages as I would turn to the pages of the literature of 
the Stoics, or to the Buddhists, or to Plato. 

But I do most emphatically believe in what we call 
the historic method, when looking for light on the 
pathway of life. We each one of us have only a lim- 
ited experience, and after we have once gotten it, the 
time is nearly past when we can make it useful. But 
the human race at large has had enormous experience 
on this very one matter, as to what gives value to life 
and how to get the most value out of life. There is 
more to be had in the experience of the human race 
in this regard than in one's own experience. Only 
in the rarest instances, therefore, should one go con- 
trary to what the enlightened portion of the human 
race has come to regard as the right course of life. 

The first rule, therefore, which we should lay down 
for those who want light on life’s past pathway is the 
old one, “Search the Scriptures.” Only, by this I 
mean all scriptures which tradition has led us to be- 


172 


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lieve contained elements of value. It is in such scrip- 
tures that we find the records of human experience. 

The trouble is, however, that in searching literature 
for this purpose, we find so many influences merging 
together in the same literature; and so the light often 
is confusing and sometimes adds more embarrassment 
than help. 

I have said that on the whole the Bible, taking it 
altogether, gives more light on the pathway of life 
than any other volume of literature from past times. 
You will find, to be sure, equally valuable precepts in 
the writings of the Stoics, or in the scriptures of Bud- 
dhism, or in the poetry and philosophy of Greece. 

But the trouble with such sources of light is that 
they speak oftentimes only of special personal ex- 
perience or special epochs in history. 

The peculiarity of the Bible is that it is a record of 
nearly a thousand years of continuous experience on 
the problems I speak of. If the Apocrypha and the 
book of “Enoch” had been retained in the Bible, we 
should have all the threads by which we could trace 
the growth of the Hebrew mind on certain of the 
greatest problems of existence, covering a period of 
nearly ten centuries. If this had been ten centuries 
of the more advanced experience it would have been 
of far less value. The records of the experience of the 
Hebrew race for the last eighteen hundred years do 
not compare in importance, for the light they give, to 
the records of the preceding eight hundred or one 
thousand years. 

And why, do you ask? Because in those first re- 
cords we have the growth from its start, as it were; 
from the childhood of the race upward to maturity. 
And this is what gives it the value I speak of. 

Furthermore, there is something most peculiar to 
this literature as a characteristic, which belongs in the 
same degree to no other literature in the world, as far 
as I know, covering the same length of time. It is the 
singular unity or continuity of it. Other literatures 
would seem to show more or less fusion with outside 
influences, and the fusion took place so rapidly that 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


173 


we are not able oftentimes to detect the lines where 
the parts ran together. But the extraordinary race- 
tenacity of the Hebrews has been one of the phenom- 
ena of history, and it was that race tenacity which 
gives us in the Bible literature such continuity of ex- 
perience. 

To be sure, as I have said again and again in these 
lectures, we see where other influences entered. But 
the striking fact is that in the case of the literature of 
the Hebrews it is usually possible for the scholar to fix 
on the entering point of anything that came in from 
the outside, and to decide what belonged essentially to 
the Hebrew mind itself. After the first or second cen- 
turies of the Christian era the literatures of what we 
now call “Christendom” began to run together, and I 
doubt if anyone could clearly tell in the books or writ- 
ings of the third or fourth centuries, just what was 
Roman thought, what was Egyptian thought, what 
was Greek thought, what was Hebrew thought, or 
what thoughts came from far-away India. 

The striking value of the Bible literature is that the 
attitude of mind in the portions which came later, do 
not accord with the attitude of mind which came 
first. You observe that the very point which the old 
school would have thought most destructive to the 
value of this literature, is the one which I put forward 
as most emphasizing its value. The significance of it 
all is that we see the gradual development of mind, 
the coming in of more and more light. 

We traced this feature for you with regard to one 
of the great problems of history, dealing with belief 
in God. But if there were time or space it would be 
possible to do it with some of the other great prob- 
lems on the more practical side. 

Take, for instance, the problem of the Family, and 
see the wonderful discoveries made by the Hebrew 
race on that score, and how those discoveries are re- 
corded. In the primitive pictures of the prehistoric 
times, which are presented to us in the first portions 
of the Bible, in those stories of the Patriarchs, we see 
the nomad family life, where perhaps the children 


174 


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could be traced only through the line of the mother 
and where the Patriarchs may have had many wives. 
It was what I should call the “nomad” family life — 
without unity, without coherence, without spiritual- 
ity. The family had not found itself, or found its soul. 

As soon as you get the books of the Old Testament 
arranged in their chronological order you see how 
the Hebrew race began to find more and more light on 
this subject of the family, until by and by their whole 
attitude changed and they came to believe in the fam- 
ily of one husband and one wife, the Monogamic 
Family. They had found out by experience what was 
the true family life, and the striking fact is that they 
saw the point from its spiritual side. It was connected 
with the religious beliefs of the people; it grew with 
the growth of the belief about gods or God, until the 
prophet could illustrate polytheism and its effects as 
like the influence of polygamy. Having many wives 
was like having many gods, and so the favorite though 
sad figure employed by the prophets in pointing out 
what it meant to lose one’s supreme devotion to the 
one God, Jehovah, was like being careless with regard 
to the spiritual significance of sex. And the result was 
to throw a spiritual element into the family life, to dig- 
nify its unity, so that when the Bible came to its 
close its whole weight was thrown on the side of an 
ideal, monogamic, family life. By that means such a 
family life was established as the only true family, for 
the rest of the history of the human race. 

If I had the time I should like to point out to you 
likewise the evolution of the idea of justice as you 
watch it through the Bible. You can see how the 
Hebrew race got light more and more on this subject, 
and you can trace up the stages of the light as it grew 
and expanded. You see the primitive attitude of the 
wandering hordes of the earliest times, to whom prac- 
tically “might made right.” And then you see how 
the higher law comes in and the ethical code is laid 
down: “Thou shalt not lie; thou shalt not kill;” but 
holding for the most part only among the members of 
the tribe. 


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175 


You observe later on, when those historic books 
went through their final revision, a new attitude of 
mind had come, which led the last authorities to 
change the tone of the old records and to interpolate 
explanations or excuses that are wonderfully signifi- 
cant. We know beyond any doubt that the Israelites 
undertook to conquer Palestine and slay the Canaan- 
ites, in just the same spirit that the savage hordes 
from the north and east of Europe swept down over 
the higher civilization of the Roman Empire and con- 
quered it. It is recognized that there was more civ- 
ilization among the Canaanites at first than among the 
Israelites. 

But when the sense of justice had advanced further, 
you see how the more enlightened ethical mind of the 
Hebrew race wanted to show that their forefathers did 
all this because of the wickedness of the Canaanites 
and because their God, “Yahweh,” had commanded 
them to root out the wickedness from Palestine by 
exterminating the people who had dwelled there. 

Do you call this falsifying history? I think that 
name would be a mistake. As a matter of fact, we are 
more than glad that it was done, because in the very 
fact that such a step was taken we have the record of 
the ethical advance of the Hebrew mind and the new 
light which had come on the subject of justice. The 
people of Palestine had come to see that justice with 
its rules held between one race and another race, and 
was not merely an affair of the tribe, and that aggres- 
sive warfare was only to be carried on according as 
the people had justice for it. When they came to see 
or to feel that justice applied to it, then they said that 
their God commanded it. 

So, too, you can trace the new light which came in, 
regarding the true spirit of fellow feeling or of broth- 
erly love. We see it prevailing only at first perhaps 
within the family; afterward only within the tribe; 
then only within the race. 

The idea that the code of justice applied between 
one race and another, came a long while before the 
standpoint was adopted which asked that there should 


176 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


be fellow feeling or love between one race and an- 
other. Hundreds of years elapsed before this further 
standpoint began to apply. I showed you how it de- 
veloped in the book of Jonah, but coming to its full 
form perhaps only in the last and greatest of the pro- 
phets of the Hebrew race, when, as I told you, Judaism 
expanded into a universal religion. 

The Bible, one might say, closes as a growth, in 
that beautiful chapter from the Apostle of St. Paul 
on “charity,” which was the old English word, as you 
know, for “love.” 

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and 
have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling 
cymbal. 

“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand 
all mysteries, and all knowledge ; and though I have all faith, 
so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am 
nothing. 

“And although I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and 
though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, 
it profiteth me nothing. 

“Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not; 
charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. 

“Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is 
not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. 

“Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. 

“Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, 
endureth all things. 

Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they 
shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether 
there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. 

“For we know in part, and we prophecy in part. 

“But when that which is perfect is come, then that which 
is in part shall be done away. 

“When I was a child, I understood as a child, I thought as 
a child ; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to 
face ; now I know in part ; but then I shall know even as I am 
known. 

“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the 
greatest of these is charity.” 

In only one respect, perhaps, can you see that to- 
ward the end the Bible grows reactionary. In the 
last portion of it we get no light or almost none, on 
the ethical or spiritual attitude to be taken toward that 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


177 


great institution which was to assume such impor- 
tance in the later times, the political organism, or the 
State. 

In this direction the literature of the Bible does not 
give us a great deal of help, because there were two 
theories almost from the outset with regard to the 
State, prevalent among the thoughtful Hebrews, — one 
of which looked upon the State as a theocracy, as- 
suming that God only was the King, and the Church 
the only real State; the other divided Church and 
State as two separate institutions. Nowhere during 
the thousand years while this literature was develop- 
ing can we see those two attitudes fusing into one, and 
in that way giving us a clear light on what now is per- 
haps the greatest problem of the world. 

The New Testament ignores this subject, for the 
simple reason, as I explained to you, that the expecta- 
tion was strong that the world was soon to come to 
an end. Hence the attitude of mind among the earlier 
followers of Jesus was to ignore the State as an insti- 
tution altogether, watching for the time when the 
Judgment Day should come and the State should be- 
come the “Kingdom of God.” 

We do not put forward this literature to you as if 
it contained all the light or the wisdom needful, or as 
if the light ceased to grow when the Bible came to an 
end. 

Nor do we ask you to believe all that you find there, 
to accept all the theology contained in that literature. 
You cannot do so, for the simple reason that the 
theology at the end is not the same theology as at 
the beginning. As far as the theology-side . is con- 
cerned I leave you to your own attitude of mind con- 
cerning it. I study the Bible for the light it may 
throw on the pathway of the true life, rather than the 
light it may throw on what is beyond or outside of 
life. 

In another sense the Bible did not come to an end 
when the literature was completed. Human ex- 
perience has gone on just the same. More and more 
light has come to the world, and we have to search 


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the scriptures for later times as well as of the times of 
old, for all the light to be had. But our beginning 
should be made in our study with these so-called Sa- 
cred Scriptures. 

Yet there is a charm in these Scriptures apart from 
the light they shed on the pathway of life. It is as 
with the light of the sun ; it may come in one form or 
another ; sometimes in rainbow hues or sunset tints ; 
sometimes only in the clear, steady noonday glare. 
The additional charm of the Bible is that a great deal 
of the light comes in such beautiful forms and that 
what we have here is not merely abstract precepts, but 
literature or poetry. 

The Bible, in another sense, is the literature of the 
Hebrew race for about a thousand years. All of it is 
not alike beautiful in form. Some of it is rather dry 
and tame. Then again, there are portions of it as 
fine as anything in Shakespeare. 

On the whole, there is less poetry or real literature 
in the New Testament than in the Old Testament. 
The trouble is, as I told you, that so much of the 
New Testament is second-hand. Nowhere do we have 
the continued language of Jesus. And even where we 
have his sayings, they are not in what was his mother 
tongue. The Sermon on the Mount, as we know, was 
only a collection of precepts which he had made from 
time to time and which were brought together after 
his death. Here and there, to be sure, there are par- 
ables which seem to read as if coming pretty near to 
what he must have said, and those parables have a 
simplicity and beauty about them which will make 
them immortal even as literature. Was there ever a 
drama put on the stage by any playwright since the 
world began, which has more struck home to the hu- 
man heart than the simple story of the Prodigal Son? 
How that story tells the whole life experience of many 
a mortal creature ! Perhaps the finest literary gem in 
the New Testament is the celebrated speech attributed 
to Saint Paul and supposed to have been made on 
Mars Hill at Athens. I might quote this to you in or- 
der to bring out the simplicity of style. No philoso- 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


179 


pher to-day could use such a style. He would want to 
twist in and out with all sorts of side lights, or run off 
on by-paths. But in this one short speech, made on 
Mars Hill by Saint Paul, you see practically all the 
growth of the Hebrew race in its idea of God : 

“Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ Hill, and said, Ye 
men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too super- 
stitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I 
found an altar with this inscription, “To the Unknown God.” 
Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto 
you. God that made the world, and all things therein, seeing 
that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples 
made with hands ; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as 
though he needed anything, seeing, he giveth to all life, and 
breath, and all things ; and hath made of one blood all nations 
of men, for to dwell on all the face of earth; and hath de- 
termined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their 
habitation ; they that should seek the Lord, if haply they might 
feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every 
one of us : For in him we live, and move, and have our being ; 
as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also 
his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of 
God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, 
or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the 
times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth 
all men everywhere to repent: Because he hath appointed a 
day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness, 
by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given 
assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the 
dead.” 

I ask you, could a modern man go to a strange 
people to proclaim a new religion and do it in sim- 
ple language like that? Saint Paul himself did not 
know that his speech was to go into a Bible; more 
than that, he did not know himself that his own race 
had also at one time thought of the God-head as “like 
unto gold or silver or stone graven by art and man’s 
device.” He did not know that he was a crowning 
feature of a thousand years of a race groping after 
light on the subject of God-head and God. 

When it comes to the New Testament as a whole, 
the literary quality of it is not so high as with the 
earlier portions of the Bible. 

My experience has been that when I wanted to in- 
dulge in the charms of literature as a feature of the 


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Bible, instinctively I turned to the Old Testament. 
Nothing in “Hamlet / 5 for instance, is finer than what 
you come upon in the book of Job. Neither of these 
two tragedies offers a solution to the problems which 
are raised. They just show the soul of man beating 
with its wings against the walls which hide the in- 
scrutible. And in either of these works we are sure 
to find in exquisite language what has been more or 
less seething in ourselves in chaotic form. We all 
think, and down in our souls we all have huge interro- 
gation points. But only the great artists or the geni- 
uses find a way of putting these interrogation points 
into immortal language. Was it strange that Job 
should have raised the question why the sun shines 
alike on the just and on the unjust? And in the way 
he and his comforters tossed the arguments to and fro, 
you find reproduced the same old questions and an- 
swers we may give to-day. What you have, therefore, 
is a record of heart experiences in such literature. 
So, too, if you find the time to read the Psalms, you 
can run the whole gamut of hope and disappointment 
there. It all takes more or less of a religious charac- 
ter; but whatever character it may asume, every 
soul runs through that gamut at one time or another. 

I wish I could induce you to turn to your Bible and 
read the book of Genesis straight through from be- 
ginning to end, omitting, however, the genealogies. I 
fancy that many of you have not done this, who have 
read translations of the “Iliad 55 of Homer. And why 
have you read Homer ? Because, you will tell me, it is 
great literature and it gives us rare pictures of the 
primitive world, of the human race in its childhood. 

Now I must remind you that you have in the book 
of Genesis an equally great classic, and far more en- 
tertaining as literature than anything which you will 
find in Homer. If only you will go to it, not from a 
sense of duty, but with the same motive with which 
you turn to your “Iliad , 55 you may be surprised at the 
charm of the book of Genesis. 

There, too, you will find pictures exquisitely told, 
of the childhood of the human race. You will find 


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181 


human nature showing itself with a naive frankness, 
the good and evil right on the surface just as you see 
it in children to-day, save that the persons described 
there are “children of a larger growth.” You read 
how great men may have lifted up their faces and 
wept. You read of family joys and family troubles ; of 
the life of fathers and mothers and of the fathers' and 
mothers' disappointments. The story of the world or 
of the human race is written there in those chapters 
in a simplicity that is marvelous, and which no mod- 
ern man to-day could ever imitate or reproduce. 

If only you would be willing to read those stories 
of the Patriarchs just as pictures, in the way you read 
your Homer ! See how the people of those early days 
felt toward their gods, as toward “Zeus” or “Pallas.” 
The time had not yet come when self-consciousness 
was so strong that grown men sought to hide their 
feelings. Their ideals had not shot far ahead of their 
practice, and you see, therefore, the naive human 
heart as it actually was in those days. What a picture 
you have in that speech of Jacob punished for all his 
mistakes, and seeing that he was to lose his dearest 
child, as he lifted up his voice and said: 

“Joseph is not and Simeon is not and ye will take Benjamin 
away. All these things are against me. My son shall not go 
down with you to Egypt, for his brother is dead and he only 
is left. If mischief befall him by the way in the which ye go, 
then shall ye bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the 
grave.” 

A part of this matter reads like the stories an aged 
mother would tell to her children, of bygone things 
as she had heard them from her aged grandmother. 

Much indeed of this beautiful literature has become 
so classic that we quote it as we quote Shakespeare, 
scarcely knowing where the words came from. I wish 
I could induce you to read over again that charming 
tale called the book of “Ruth.” Who has not heard 
and remembered that straightforward speech of the 
daughter of the Gentiles, to Naomi : 

“Entreat me not to leave thee or to return from following 
after thee. For whither thou goest I will go; and where 


182 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


thou lodgest I will lodge ; thy people shall be my people and 
thy God my God ; where thou diest will I die and there will I 
be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but 
death part thee and me.” 

Do you recall anything anywhere in the world liter- 
ature more perfectly expressive of fealty or absolute 
devotion, than this speech of Ruth to Naomi? 

And even when the childhood of the race was pass- 
ing away, when a sterner atmosphere was abroad and 
a higher sense of justice was awakened, when the race 
was coming to a fuller sense of its mission or destiny, 
even then the straightforward simplicity of speech is 
there and the rare literary qualities to which we have 
alluded. 

Fully five hundred years had passed away from the 
time of the Patriarchs to the time of David. And yet 
the truth and realism which goes with the best litera- 
ture is before us in reading the stories of David and 
his experiences. David, too, in a way was a child — a 
“child of nature,” as we should say — but not living 
quite in the “childhood of the world.” A stern sense 
of ethical judgment had grown up and was practiced 
in his time. We know the awful act of crime he had 
committed when he envied the wife of one of his 
officers, and then in order to secure her for himself had 
that officer placed at the head of the ranks of battle 
that the man might fall at the edge of the sword. It 
all happened as David planned and David got the wife 
he wanted ; and in the boldness of his heart he cared 
naught for any dawning sense of justice in the world. 

But I ask you whether you can find in Buddhism or 
the literature of Greece or in Shakespeare anything 
finer than this description of the meeting of David and 
the prophet Nathan after the crime had been com- 
mitted : 

.“And the Lord sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto 
him and said unto him : There were two men in one city ; the 
one rich and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding 
many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing, save 
one ewe lamb which he had brought and nourished up. And 
it grew up together with him and with his children ; it did eat 
of his own meat; and drink of his own cup, and lay in his 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


183 


bosom and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a 
traveler unto the rich man and he spared to take of his own 
flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that 
was come unto him, but took the poor man’s lamb and dressed 
it for the man that was come unto him. And David’s anger 
was greatly kindled against the man and he said to Nathan: 
As the Lord liveth the man that hath done this, is worthy to 
die. And Nathan said to David: Thou art the man.” 

This is literature ; but it is more. It is a picture of a 
human heart, a sketch of a condition of an age. Many 
a man has fairly trembled to the very core of his being 
when he has heard this story read and come upon 
those words, “Thou art the man.” 

I am suggesting to you the literary elements to be 
found in the Bible. You come upon prose and poetry 
alike there — the bad passions and the good passions, 
the love feelings and the feelings of hate; aspiration 
on the one hand or despair on the other. 

But more than that, you have Nature poetry. There 
is something else besides the mystery of the human 
heart; there is the mystery of the mighty Nature- 
world, which the man of science probes and discusses 
and works at, but never wholly unveils. Poetry revels 
sometimes in the passions of the human heart and its 
mysteries. But now and then it turns away and revels 
in the mystery of the Nature- world. You have both 
these elements in the Bible. 

I know of no pictures of Nature in English poetry 
finer in their way than what you have in the Old Tes- 
tament. You will find these pictures in the Psalms, 
and in the writings of the prophets. You see what a 
sense the Hebrew race displayed through their litera- 
ture, for the mystery of the sky and of the earth and 
of the sea. You notice how fond they were of Nature’s 
beauty, and see the eye they had for the simple things 
of beauty around them. The last of the prophets, Je- 
sus, could talk of the “lilies of the field” and of their 
charm. He, too, had observed the grace of the swal- 
low’s movements when on the wing. But long before 
his day the thoughtful man of Israel had watched that 
same beauty and talked of it. 


184 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


I wish I could persuade you to turn to the last chap- 
ters in the book of Job and see whether you do not 
come upon Nature-poetry there, as great or greater 
than anything in your Wordsworth or your Goethe. 
Many of you know these chapters, but you cannot 
know them too well; they are worth committing to 
memory, like great passages from the English or Ger- 
man poets. It is the heart of man you have here, voic- 
ing his sense of the mystery of things, especially the 
mystery of Nature — the mystery before which the man 
of science to-day must bow down, like the prophet or 
priest of those years long ago. 

‘‘Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and 
said: Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without 
knowledge ? 

“Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of 
thee and declare thou unto me. 

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? 
Declare if thou hast understanding. 

“Who determined the measures thereof, if thou knowest? 
Or who stretched the line upon it? 

“Whereupon were the foundations thereof fastened? Or 
who laid the corner stone thereof? 

“When the morning stars sang together and all the sons ot 
God shouted for joy? 

“Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth; 

“When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick 
darkness the swaddling band for it, and prescribed for it 
my decree, and set bars and doors, and said : 

“Hitherto shalt thou come but no further; and here shall 
thy proud waves be stayed. 

“Hast thou comprehended the breadth of the earth ? Declare 
if thou knowest it all. 

“Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and as for dark- 
ness where is the place thereof; 

“That thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof and that 
thou shouldest discern the paths to the house thereof? 

“Hast thou entered the treasuries of the snow or hast thou 
seen the treasuries of the hail? 

“By what way is the light parted, or the east wind scattered 
upon the earth? 

“Who hath cleft a channel for the water flood or a way for 
the lightning of the thunder, to cause it to rain on a land 
where no man is ; on the wilderness wherein there is no man ; 

“To satisfy the waste and desolate ground and to cause the 
tender grass to spring forth? 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 185 

“Hath the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the drops 
of dew? 

“Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose the 
bands of Orion? 

“Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens? Canst thou 
establish the dominion thereof in the earth? 

“Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds that abundance 
of waters may cover thee? 

“Canst thou send forth lightnings that they may go, and say 
unto thee. Here we are? 

“Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? 

“Who can number the clouds by wisdom?” 

This is as fine a piece of work as the statues of the 
ancient sculptors of Greece or as great a work of art 
in its way as the Parthenon. 

I do not mean to say that all the Old Testament is 
of this character. Some of it may be dry and wanting 
in literary merit. But anyone who knows how to read, 
can find the poetry and literature there. 

In turning to the hymn music of the Psalms you 
will find passages there of exquisite beauty and the loft- 
iest sentiment. There are portions of the Psalms, to 
be sure, which were not inspired in that way, and 
where the spirit is stern and almost vindictive. But 
there are other passages of tenderness and poetry 
speaking of the best that is in the human heart. 

More than all else in the whole Bible I sometimes 
feel as if I liked the great Hebrew prophets. They 
may have been wanting in tenderness. When the 
times are evil the judges have to be stern rather than 
tender; and in those days the times were evil. 

But if the prophets were stern in their judgments 
they used unconsciously oftentimes a magnificent art- 
form. The images which they draw in order to bring 
out their thought, are fully up to the best figures of 
speech or images in your Shakespeare. Perhaps the 
finest portions, however, to be found in the prophets^ 
as regards the poetry or literature, are in those pas- 
sages where the element of sternness is subdued and 
you have a foretaste of the millennium. The darker 
the cloud was, which hung over the earth and shut out 
even the horizon, the more intense became the visions 
of the prophets as to what was behind the cloud. 


186 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


I wish I could induce you to turn to Isaiah and read 
from the fortieth chapter straight through to the end. 
It was not all by one writer. A number of passages 
from other authors have crept in there. But in those 
pictures you have visions of immortal worth. Even in 
the first Isaiah there are indications of it. 

I read for instance: 

“Behold a King shall reign in righteousness and princes 
shall rule in judgment. And a man shall be as an hiding 
place for the wind and a covert from the tempest ; 

“As rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great 
rock in a weary land. 

“And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the 
ears of them that hear shall harken. 

“The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge, the 
tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly. 

“The vile persons shall no more be called noble nor the 
churl said to be bountiful” 

But further on in the second Isaiah it is, where we 
come upon the loftiest strain : 

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the 
Lord is risen upon thee. 

“For behold the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross 
darkness the people ; but the Lord shall rise upon thee, and his 
glory shall be seen upon thee. 

“And nations shall come to thy light, and kings to the 
brightness of thy rising. 

“Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that no 
man went through thee, I will make thee an eternal excel- 
lency, a joy of many generations. 

“Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, destruction 
within thy borders. 

“The sun shall no more be thy light by day, neither for 
brightness shall the moon give light unto thee. But the Lord 
shall be unto thee an everlasting light and thy God thy glory. 

“Thy people shall be all righteous ; they shall inherit the land 
forever.” 

I do not say that this is the culmination of the whole 
ideal, or that you have the Perfect Picture in the pro- 
phets. No; the light had to go on expanding after 
the prophets had ceased to speak and after the Bible 
had closed. Even the vision of Isaiah is not of the 
millennium of the whole human race, but merely a pic- 
ture of a glorified city for those who were to dwell at 


THE STORY OF THE BIBLE 


187 


Jerusalem. It has taken two thousand years or more 
for the human race to come to a conception of a 
millennium that was to include all the races of man. 
And even now our visions are seldom quite so broad. 
Down in our heart of hearts we make some exceptions. 
Even we to-day have not quite passed beyond the 
childhood of the past. 

But I have done enough in these lectures if I have 
given you some idea of the worth of the Bible of 
Christendom. Again I repeat : Read the Scriptures ! 


Literature 


OLD TESTAMENT 

S. R. Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old 
Testament (io ed. N. Y. 1905). 

C. F. Kent, Student's Old Testament logically and 
chronologically arranged. (5 vols. N.Y. 1908). 

E. Kautsch, Outline of the History of the Old Testa- 
ment (London, 1898). 

(Brief sketch with chronological survey, &c.). 

R. Kittel, History of the Hebrews (2 vols. N. Y. 1904). 

NEW TESTAMENT 

Julicher, Introduction to the New Testament (London, 
1904, English Translation). 

C. R. Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testamen 
(Edinburgh, 1907). 











































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